“Hilary!”

“No.” and the tears burst from her angry eyes, “I don’t mean that I despise him.  I’m sorry for him:  there is good in him, poor dear lad; but I despise his weakness; I feel fierce to think how much it will cost us all, and especially you, Johanna.  Only think what comforts of all sorts that thirty pounds would have brought to you!”

“God will provide,” said Johanna, earnestly.  “But I know, my dear, this is sharper to you than to me.  Besides, I have been more used to it.”

She closed her eyes, with a half shudder, as if living over again the old days—­when Henry Leaf’s wife and eldest daughter used to have to give dinner parties upon food that stuck in their throats, as if every morsel had been stolen; which in truth it was, and yet they were helpless, innocent thieves; when they and the children had to wear clothes that seemed to poison them like the shirt of Dejanira; when they durst not walk along special streets, nor pass particular shops, for the feeling that the shop people must be staring, and pointing, and jibing at them, “Pay me what thou owest!”

“But things can not again be so bad as those days, Hilary.  Ascott is young; he may mend.  People can mend, my child; and he had such a different bringing up from what his father had, and his grandfather, too.  We must not be hopeless yet.  You see,” and making Hilary kneel down before her, she took her by both hands, as if to impart something of her own quietness to this poor heart, struggling as young, honest, upright hearts do struggle with something which their whole nature revolts against, and loathes, and scorns—­“you see, the boy is our boy; our own flesh and blood.  We were very foolish to let him away from us for so long.  We might have made him better if we had kept him at Stowbury.  But he is young; that is my hope of him; and he was always fond of his aunts, and is still, I think.”

Hilary smiled sadly.  “Deeds, not words I don’t believe in words.”

“Well, let us put aside believing, and only act.  Let us give him another chance.”

Hilary shook her head.  “Another, and another, and another—­it will be always the same.  I know it will.  I can’t tell how it is, Johanna; but whenever I look at you, I feel so stern and hard to Ascott.  It seems as if there were circumstances when pity to some, to one, was wicked injustice to others:  as if there were times when it is right and needful to lop off, at once and forever, a rotten branch rather than let the whole tree go to rack and ruin.  I would do it!  I should think myself justified in doing it.”

“But not just yet.  He is only a boy—­our own boy.”

And the two women, in both of whom the maternal passion existed strong and deep, yet in the one never had found, and in the other never might find, its natural channel, wept together over this lad, almost as mothers weep.

“But what can we do?” said Hilary at last.