“Come now, Sissy, be a good lassie and say that ye’re content to stay.  Ye’ve always been a good lassie and done what I told ye before.”

His accent was Scotch, but not the broad Scotch of an entirely uneducated man.  There was sobriety written in the traits of his face, and more—­a certain quality of intellectual virtue of the higher stamp.  He was not young, but he was not yet old.

“I haven’t,” said the girl sullenly.

He sighed at her perverseness.  “That’s not the way I remember it.  I’m sure, from the time ye were quite a wee one, ye have always tried to please me.—­We all come short sometimes; the thing is, what we are trying to do.”

He spoke as if her antagonism to what he had been saying, to what he was yet saying, had had a painful effect upon him which he was endeavouring to hide.

The girl looked over his head at the smoke that was proceeding from the log-house chimney.  She saw it curl and wreathe itself against the cold blue east.  It was white wood smoke, and as she watched it began to turn yellow in the light from the sunset.  She did not turn to see whence the yellow ray came.

“Now that father’s dead, I won’t stay here, Mr. Bates.”  She said “I won’t” just as a sullen, naughty girl would speak. “’Twas hateful enough to stay while he lived, but now you and Miss Bates are nothing to me.”

“Nothing to ye, Sissy?” The words seemed to come out of him in pained surprise.

“I know you’ve brought me up, and taught me, and been far kinder to me than father ever was; but I’m not to stay here all my life because of that.”

“Bairn, I have just been telling ye there is nothing else ye can do just now.  I have no ready money.  Your father had nothing to leave ye but his share of this place; and, so far, we’ve just got along year by year, and that’s all.  I’ll work it as well as I can, and, if ye like, ye’re welcome to live free and lay by your share year by year till ye have something to take with ye and are old enough to go away.  But if ye go off now ye’ll have to live as a servant, and ye couldn’t thole that, and I couldn’t for ye.  Ye have no one to protect ye now but me.  I’ve no friends to send ye to.  What do ye know of the world?  It’s unkind—­ay, and it’s wicked too.”

“How’s it so wicked?  You’re not wicked, nor father, nor me, nor the men—­how’s people outside so much wickeder?”

Bates’s mouth—­it was a rather broad, powerful mouth—­began to grow hard at her continued contention, perhaps also at the thought of the evils of which he dreamed.  “It’s a very evil world,” he said, just as he would have said that two and two made four to a child who had dared to question that fact.  “Ye’re too young to understand it now:  ye must take my word for it.”

She made no sort of answer; she gave no sign of yielding; but, because she had made no answer, he, self-willed and opinionated man that he was, felt assured that she had no answer to give, and went on to talk as if that one point were settled.