“No,” said I, “but I am more. I am both his friend and yours.”
“Do you mean to reprove him?” she asked.
“It is my duty—in part,” said I, for the thought of mine office had come upon me, and I feared that for this girl’s sake I might even be ready ignominiously to demit and decline my plain duty.
“For that wherein he has given the unrighteous cause to speak reproachfully, I will reprove him,” I said. “For the rest, I will aid, support, and succour him in all that one man may do to another. By confession of his fault, such as it has been, he may yet keep the Cause from being spoken against.”
“Ah, you do not know my father, to speak thus of him,” Mary Gordon cried, clasping her hands. “When he is in his fury he cares for neither man nor beast. He might do you a hurt, even to the touching of your life. Ah, do not go to him.” (Here she clasped her hands, and looked at me with such sweet, petitionary graciousness that my heart became as wax within me.) “Let him come to himself. What are reproof and hard words, besides the shame that comes when such a man as my father sits face to face with the sins of his own heart?”
Almost I had given way, but the thought of the dread excommunication, and the danger which his children must also incur, compelled me.
“Hear me, Mary,” I said, “I must speak to him. For all our sakes—yours as well—I must go instantly to Alexander Gordon.”
She waved her hand impatiently.
“Do not go,” she said. “Can you not trust me? I thought you—you once told me that you loved me. And if you had loved me, I do not know, I might——”
She paused. A wild hope—warm, tender, gloriously insurgent, rose-coloured—welled up triumphantly in my heart. My blood hummed in my ears.