All was clear to her! Amy had come, and died defending her husband from her father! Hester put her strong arms around the dainty little figure and lifted it limp, its long wet hair and helpless head hanging over the crook of her arm. She gave a great sob. Was this what Amy’s lovely, brave womanhood had brought her to! What creatures men were! She glanced down and saw on Amy’s neck a frightful swollen welt.

She looked to her father. There was the whip in his hand.

“Oh, papa!” she screamed. She could not look him in the face. As she dropped her eyes, she saw the terrified face of Cornelius open its eyes.

“Oh, Corney!” said Hester, in the tone of an accusing angel, and ran from the room with Amy in her arms.

The mother darted to her son.

But the wrath of the father rose afresh at the sight.

“Let the hound lie!” he said, stepping between them. “What right has he to walk the earth like a man?”

“You’ve killed him, Gerald!—your own son!” said the mother with a cold, still voice.

She saw the dreadful mark on his face, began to stagger, and would have fallen. But the arm that, through her son, had struck her heart caught and supported her. The husband bore his wife once more to her room, and the foolish son was left alone on the floor, smarting in pain, ashamed, and full of fear for his wife, yet in ignorance that his father had so violently whipped her.

A moment more and he rose. As he did, all at once he realized that the terror of his father was gone. They had met, and his father had put himself in the wrong. He was no more afraid of him. It was not hate that had cast out fear. I do not say that he felt no resentment. Cornelius was not quite so noble as that. But it consoled him that he had been hardly used by his father. He had been accustomed to look vaguely up to his father as a sort of rigid but righteous divinity. In a disobedient, self-indulgent, poverty-stricken nature like his, reverence could only take the form of fear. And now that he had seen his father in a rage, the feeling of reverence, such as it was, had begun to give way, and with it the fear. They were more upon a level. And too, his father’s unmerciful use of the whip to him seemed a sort of settling of scores, thence in a measure, a breaking down of the wall between them. A weight as of a rock was lifted from his mind by this violent blowing up of the horrible negation that had been between them so long. He felt—as when punished in boyhood—as if the storm had passed, and the sun had begun to appear. He did not yet know to what a state his wife was brought. He knew she was safe with Hester.