"Or even quite fair to her?"
"Oh, come!" said the Collector. "Tongues? I hadn't thought of that."
"I dare say not." Mr. Trask glanced up at the windows of a two-storeyed house on the left, scarcely a stone's throw away, a respectable mansion with a verandah and neat gateway of wrought iron. "But at the end of this what becomes of her?"
The Collector shrugged his shoulders. "I have thought of that, at all events. My coach will be here to take her home. It lies on my road. As for me, I shall have to mount at once and ride through the night—a second test for the back-bone."
"Ride and be hanged to you!" broke out Mr. Trask with a snarl of scorn. "But for the rest, if your foppery leave you any room to consider the girl, you couldn't put a worse finish on your injury. Drive her off in your coach indeed!—and what then becomes of her reputation?"
"—Of what you have left to her, you mean? Damn it—you to talk like this!"
"Do not be profane, Captain Vyell. . . . We see things differently, and this punishment was meted to her—if cruelly, as you would say—still in honest concern for her soul's good. But if you, a loose-living man—" Mr. Trask paused.
"Go on."
"I thank you. For the moment I forgot that you are not at liberty. But I used not that plainness of speech to insult you; rather because it is part of the argument. If you, then, drive away with this child in public, through this town, you do her an injury for which mere carelessness is your best excuse; and the world will assign it a worse."
"The world!"