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and perhaps said things that would have been better left to silence.

‘Angel!—Angel! I was a child—a child when it happened! I knew nothing of men.’

‘You were more sinned against than sinning, that I admit.’

‘Then will you not forgive me?’

‘I do forgive you. But forgiveness is not all.’

‘And love me?’

To this question he did not answer.

‘O Angel—my mother says that it sometimes happens so!—she knows several cases where they were worse than I, and the husband has not minded it much—has forgiven her at least. And yet the woman has not loved him as I do you!’

‘Don’t, Tess; don’t argue. Different societies, different manners. You are an unapprehending peasant woman, who have never been initiated into the proportions of social things. You don’t know what you say.’

‘I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!’

She spoke with an impulse to anger, but it went as it came.