Miss Loring made a gesture of protest.
“Wait,” he insisted. “My father was a great lawyer—one of the greatest this City and State have ever known—and yet all of these men, mental giants of their day and generation—had—had a weakness—the same weakness—the weakness that I have. To one of them it meant the loss of the only woman he had ever loved—his wife and his children; to another the sacrifice of his highest political ambition; to my father a lingering illness of which he subsequently died. That is my pedigree—of great honor—and greater shame. History has dealt kindly because their faults were those of their blood and race, for which they themselves were not accountable. This may seem strange to you because you have only learned to judge men by their performances. The phenomenon of heredity is new to you. People are taught to see the physical resemblances of the members of a family to its ancestors—but of the spiritual resemblance one knows nothing—unless—” his voice sunk until it was scarcely audible, “unless the spiritual resemblance is so strong that even Time itself cannot efface it.”
The girl did not speak. Her head was bowed but her chin was still set firmly, and her eyes, though they looked afar, were stern and unyielding.
“When I went to the woods, I was—was recovering—from an illness. I went up there at the doctor’s orders. I had to go, and I—I got better after a while. Then you came, and I learned that there was something else in life besides what I had found in it. I had never known——”
“I can’t see why I should listen to this, Mr. Gallatin.”
“Because what happened after that, you were a part of.”
“I?”
“It was you who showed me how to be well. That’s all,” he finished quietly. He rubbed the dog’s ears between his fingers and got some comfort from Chicot’s sympathy, but went on in a constrained voice. “I was hoping you might understand, that you might give me charity—if only the charity you once gave to the carcass of a dead deer.”
There was a long silence during which he watched her downcast profile, but when at last she lifted her head, he knew that she was still unyielding.
“You ask too much, Mr. Gallatin,” she said constrainedly. “If you were dead you might have my pity—even my tears, but living—living I can only—only hold you in—abhorrence.”