“The sin of the parents is the sin of the child,” she answered, and then of a sudden she took fire as it were, and fell upon me and beat me with her tongue; nor could I hold my own before this girl of eighteen, the truth being that she had right on her side, and I knew it.  She told me that we were wicked plotters who, to pleasure ourselves, had stolen from Ralph everything except his life; and many other such hard sayings she threw at me till at last I could bear it no more, but gave her back word for word.  Indeed, it would be difficult to say which had the best of that quarrel, for if Suzanne’s tongue was the nimbler and her words were winged with truth, I had the weight of experience on my side and the custom of authority.  At last, as she paused breathless, I cried out: 

“And for whose sake was all this done, you ungrateful chit, if it was not for your own?”

“If that was so, which is not altogether true,” she answered, “it would have pleased me better, if, rather than make me a partner in this crime, and set me as bait to snare Ralph, you had left me to look after my own welfare.”

“What!” I exclaimed, “are you then so shallow hearted that you were ready to bid farewell to him who for many years has been as your brother, and is now your affianced husband?  You know well whatever he might promise now, that if once he had gone across the sea to England, you would have seen him no more.”

“No,” she answered, growing calm of a sudden, “I was not so prepared, for sooner would I die than lose Ralph.”

“How, then, do you square this with all your fine talk?” I asked, thinking that at length I had trapped her.  “If he had gone you must have lost him.”

“Not so,” she answered, innocently, “for I should have married him before he went, and then I could have been certain that he would return here whenever I wished it.”

Now when I heard this I gasped, partly because the girl’s cleverness took the breath from me, and partly with mortification that I should have lived to learn wisdom from the mouth of a babe and a suckling.  For there was no doubt of it, this plan, of which I had not even thought, was the answer to the riddle, since by means of it Ralph might have kept his own, and we, I doubt not, should have kept Ralph.  Once married to Suzanne he would have returned to her, or if she had gone with him for a little while, which might have been better, she would certainly have brought him back, seeing that she loved us and her home too well to forsake them.

Yes, I gasped, and the only answer that I could make when I reflected how little need there had been for the sin which we had sinned, was to burst into weeping, whereon Suzanne ran to me and kissed me and we made friends again.  But all the same, I do not think that she ever thought quite so well of me afterwards, and if I thought the more of her, still I made up my mind that the sooner she was married and had a husband of her own to preach to, the better it would be for all of us.