“If a man’s ideas of doing good don’t apply to those closest to him,” resumed Richard, “where on earth is it to begin? Must you turn your backs on those nearby and go to Russia or China for somebody to be kind to? If sir Wilton Lestrange were to come into this room this minute, you would offer him a chair. But his children you would order out of the house!”

“I wouldn’t do that,” said Mrs. Tuke.

“Mother, you did turn them out of the house—I beg your pardon, but you know it was the same thing. You visited the sins of the father on the children.”

“Bravo!” cried his uncle. “I thought you couldn’t mean it!”

“Mean what, father?”

“That rot about God you said a while ago.”

“Father, I have changed. I was wrong not to believe in God before. But the God I have come to hope in is a different person from the God my mother’s clergy have taught her to believe in, and a different God than you think you don’t believe in—different because of Jesus Christ. Do you know him, father?”

“I know the person you mean, my boy.”

“Well I now know what kind of person he is, and he said God was just like him. And I will believe in a God that is like him, if I can find him, with all my heart and soul—and so would you, father, if you knew him. You will say, perhaps, that he isn’t anywhere to know, but as someone pointed out to me, you haven’t a right to say that until you’ve been everywhere to look.”

He had spoken eagerly, and some may think he ought to have held his tongue. But neither father nor mother took offense. The mother, unspeakably relieved by what had taken place, was even ready to allow that her favourite preacher might “perhaps dwell too much upon the terrors of the law.”

— Forty-Four —

A Meeting

The next day’s mail brought a letter from Simon Armour, saying in his own peculiar way that it was time the thing was properly understood between all the parties involved, but that they must honour the baronet’s wishes and disclose nothing yet. He believed sir Wilton had his reasons. They must, therefore, as soon as possible, make it perfectly clear to him that there was no break in the chain of their proof of Richard’s identity. He proposed, therefore, that his daughter and Richard should come for a visit.

The suggestion seemed good to all concerned. Though she knew what she had done was criminal, Jane Tuke did not shrink from facing sir Wilton with the nephew by her side that she had carried to him twenty-one years earlier. To her surprise she found that she almost enjoyed the idea.

Richard cashed the post-office-order the old man had sent them, and they set out for his cottage.

The same day Simon went to Mortgrange and saw the baronet, who agreed at once to go to the cottage to meet his sister-in-law.