'Be frank and candid with me, Emma; it will not hurt me. What you heard was not to my credit?'
He was determined that the subject should not be evaded; and my mother was wise enough not to thwart him.
'It was said that you had a violent temper.'
'It was doubtless true; but,' said uncle Bryan somewhat grimly, 'time must have softened it. No one now can accuse me justly--if there is such a thing as justice in the world--of showing violence, in the ordinary meaning of the word.'
'I can bear witness to that, Bryan.'
'Go on; there was more.'
'And that it was impossible to agree with you, or your opinions.'
'My opinions! That is one of the things I wanted to arrive at. Remember, Emma, that after I left home, I held no communication with my parents; that I was as one dead to them. What was said of my opinions? Nay, nay; you hurt me more by your silence than you can possibly do by anything you can say.'
'I heard that, as a boy, you associated yourself with a society of Freethinkers, who openly boasted of their infidelity.'
'I can guess the rest; I was wanting in respect to my elders, and in obedience and duty. They did not spare me, evidently. When I left home I was seventeen years of age; I ran away--no, I walked away, in fact, for they did not care to stop me--as much displeased with the narrow-minded views of those who were nearest to me in blood, as they were doubtless with my violent temper and my independent expression of opinion. A free exercise of the reasoning powers with which we are endowed was, in their eyes, a sacrilege. Still, when I was fairly gone, they might have let me rest. Of my after career they had no knowledge.'