"I think," he said, "if I had had a son who was trying to marry her, I should have come to you just as I have come now, and I should have said, 'Why should anyone but you and I ever know?'"
"No. No, you wouldn't," said Janey, as if desperately defending some position which he was attacking. "You would want to save him at all costs."
"From what? From the woman he loves? I have not found it such great happiness to be saved from the woman I loved."
Janey hesitated, and then said—
"From some one unworthy of him."
Mr. Stirling watched an amber leaf sail to the ground. Then he said slowly—
"How do I know that Annette is unworthy of him? She may have done wrong and still be worthy of him. Do you not see that if I decided she was unworthy and hurried my son away, I should be acting on the same principle as I did in my own youth, the old weary principle which has pressed so hard on women, that you can treat a fellow-creature like a picture or a lily, or a sum of money? I handed over my love just as if she had been a lily. How often I had likened her to one! But she was alive, poor soul, all the time, and I only found it out when she was dying, years and years afterwards. Only then did my colossal selfishness confront me. She was a fellow-creature like you and me. What was it Shylock said? 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' Now, for aught we know to the contrary, Annette may be alive."
His grave eyes met hers, with a light in them, gentle, inexorable.
"Unless we are careful we may make her bleed. We have the knife ready to our hands. If you were in her place, and had a grievous incident in your past, would anything wound you more deeply than if she, she your friend, living in the same village, raked up that ugly past, and made it public for no reason?"
"But there is a reason," said Janey passionately,—"not a reason that everyone should know, God forbid, but that one person should be told, who may marry her in ignorance, and who would never marry her if he knew what you and I know—never, never, never!"