“I don’t see what that has to do with it.”

“I will tell you.  You are fierce in wrath at the disgrace to your family.  Your pride is up in arms.  You don’t care for the misery of your daughter, who, the more wrong she has done, is the more to be pitied by a father’s heart.  Your pride, I say, is all that you care about.  The wrong your daughter has done, you care nothing about; or you would have taken her to your arms years ago, in the hope that the fervour of your love would drive the devil out of her and make her repent.  I say it is not the wrong, but the disgrace you care for.  The gourd of your pride is withered, and yet you will water it with your daughter’s misery.”

“Go out of my shop,” he cried; “or I may say what I should be sorry for.”

I turned at once and left him.  I found young Tom round the corner, leaning against the wall, and reading his Virgil.

“Don’t speak to your father, Tom,” I said, “for a while.  I’ve put him out of temper.  He will be best left alone.”

He looked frightened.

“There’s no harm done, Tom, my boy.  I’ve been talking to him about your sister.  He must have time to think over what I have said to him.”

“I see, sir; I see.”

“Be as attentive to him as you can.”

“I will, sir.”

It was not alone resentment at my interference that had thus put the poor fellow beside himself, I was certain:  I had called up all the old misery—­set the wound bleeding again.  Shame was once more wide awake and tearing at his heart.  That his daughter should have done so!  For she had been his pride.  She had been the belle of the village, and very lovely; but having been apprenticed to a dressmaker in Addicehead, had, after being there about a year and a half, returned home, apparently in a decline.  After the birth of her child, however, she had, to her own disappointment, and no doubt to that of her father as well, begun to recover.  What a time of wretchedness it must have been to both of them until she left his house, one can imagine.  Most likely the misery of the father vented itself in greater unkindness than he felt, which, sinking into the proud nature she had derived from him, roused such a resentment as rarely if ever can be thoroughly appeased until Death comes in to help the reconciliation.  How often has an old love blazed up again under the blowing of his cold breath, and sent the spirit warm at heart into the regions of the unknown!  She never would utter a word to reveal the name or condition of him by whom she had been wronged.  To his child, as long as he drew his life from her, she behaved with strange alternations of dislike and passionate affection; after which season the latter began to diminish in violence, and the former to become more fixed, till at length, by the time I had made their acquaintance, her feelings seemed to have settled into what would have been indifference but for the constant reminder of her shame and her wrong together, which his very presence necessarily was.