"I assure you I have. Look here: the men clubbed together a little while ago and presented your father's works to the library, all bound, you see, in vellum. I need not mention that he had not thought it worth while to give his own books to the club."
He showed her the volumes with pride, as if the presentation had been made to a member of his own family. Lesley touched the books with gentle fingers and reverent eyes. "I have been reading 'The Unexplored,'" she said.
"I knew you would! And I knew you would like it!—I am not wrong?"
"I like it very much. But it is all new to me—so new—I feel like Ione when she first heard of the miseries of England—I have lived in an enchanted world, where everything of that sort was kept from me; so—how could I understand?"
"I know! I know!—You make me doubly ashamed of myself. I have lived, metaphorically, in dust and ashes ever since we had that talk together. Miss Brooke, I must have seemed to you the most intolerable prig! Can you ever forgive me for what I said?"
"But," said Lesley, looking straight into his face with her clear brown eyes, "if what you said was true?——"
"I had no right to say it."
"That is true," Lesley answered, coldly; and she turned about as though she did not wish to pursue the subject.
"But can you not forgive me for it? I was unjustifiably angry I confess; but since I confess it——"
"Mr. Kenyon, we ought to be going home. I see the woman is waiting to put the lights out."