"Why--yes--shouldn't it?"
"No, it shouldn't, Gusta, and what's more, it doesn't. And it doesn't to me, either. You don't want him sent to prison even if he is guilty, do you?"
"N--no," Gusta hesitated as she assented to the heresy.
"No, of course you don't. Because, Gusta, we know him--we know he's all right, don't we, no matter what he has done? Just as we know that we ourselves are all right when we do bad things--isn't that it?"
The girl was sitting with her yellow head bent; she was trying to think.
"But father would say--"
"Oh, yes," Marriott laughed, "father would say and grandfather would say, too--that's just the trouble. Father got his notions from the Old World, but we--Gusta, we know more than father or grandfather in this country."
Marriott enjoyed the discomfiture that Gusta plainly showed in her inability to understand in the least what he was saying. He felt a little mean about it, for he recognized that he was speaking for his own benefit rather than for hers; he had wished Elizabeth might be there to hear him.
"I don't know much about it, Mr. Marriott," Gusta said presently, "but when will you go to see him?"
"Oh, I'll try to get down this afternoon."