"You had better not. She's ill."
"You never said that before!" cried Mattie; "ill and alone!"
"Harriet will return home when she gets up—she is just ill enough to be kept very quiet."
"I'll not go to her, then."
Mattie still fixed her dark eyes on Mr. Wesden; that steady, unflinching gaze was making the stationer feel uncomfortable.
"I don't know that there is anything else to say," said Mattie, after a long pause; "and I suppose—you've nothing else to say to me?"
"Nothing. Except," he added, after another pause on his part, "that I hope you will take care of yourself—that this will be a lesson to you."
Mattie coloured once more, and took time to reply.
"I would part friends with you," she said at last. "I have been trying hard to bear everything that you say, remembering past kindness. You saved me at the eleventh hour, when I was going back to ruin—you taught me what was good, and made this place my home; for you and yours I would do anything in the world that lay in my power. But!" she cried, her face kindling and her eyes flashing, "if it had been any one else who had spoken to me as you have done, who had cast such cruel slander at me, and believed in nothing but my vileness, I—I think I should have killed him!"
Mr. Wesden had never seen Mattie in a passion before; her frenzy alarmed him, and he backed against the drawers behind him lest she should attempt some mischief. His confidence in the righteousness of his cause was more shaken also; but he did not know how to express it, having been ever a man whose ideas came slowly.