“Richie, Richie, stop!” Julia protested, between laughter and tears.  “Don’t talk so!  I will defend Jim,” she added gravely, “and he did have an excuse.  It seems unfair to me that he should have all the blame.”  She held her hand out, fingers spread to the reviving flame, rosy and transparent in the glow.

“Rich, no one knows this but Jim and me; not Aunt Sanna, not my own mother,” she presently resumed.  “But it makes what he did a little clearer, and I’m going to tell you.”

“Don’t tell me anything,” said Richard gruffly, eyes on the fire.

“Yes, I want to,” Julia answered.  But she was silent for a while, a look of infinite sadness on her musing face.  “I made a serious mistake when I was a girl, Rich,” she went on, after an interval.  “I had no reason for it—­not great love, or great need.  I had no excuse.  Or, yes, I did have this excuse:  I had been spoiled; I had been told that I was unusual, independent, responsible to nobody.  I knew that this thing existed all about me, and if I thought of it at all, I suppose I thought that there could be nothing so very dreadful about what men did as a matter of course!  Perhaps that’s the best explanation; my mind was like a young boy’s.  I didn’t particularly seek out this thing, or want this thing; but I was curious, and it came my way—­

“Don’t misunderstand me, Richie.  I wasn’t ‘betrayed.’  I’d had, I suppose, as little good instruction, as little example, and watching and guarding as any girl in the world.  But I knew better!  Just as every boy knows better, and is taken, sooner or later, unawares.  Of course, if I’d been a boy—­all this would be only a memory now, hardly shameful or regrettable even, dim and far away!  Especially as it lasted only a few weeks, before I was sixteen!

“And, of course, people would say that I haven’t paid the full penalty, being a girl instead of a boy!  Look at poor Tess, and Trilby, and Hetty in ‘Adam Bede!’ I never let any one know it; even your aunt never would have overlooked that, whatever she might say now.  No; even Jim protected me—­and yet,” Julia put her head back, shut her eyes, “and yet I’ve paid a thousand times!” said she.

There was a long silence, and then Richard said: 

“I’ve thought sometimes this might be it, Ju.  Being alone so much, and reading and thinking—­I’ve worked it out in my own mind.  Aunt Sanna saw Jim in Berlin two years ago, you know, and gave him a horrible raking over the coals, and just from what she quoted, it seemed as if there was some secret about it, and that it lay with you.  Then, of course,” Richie eased his lame leg by stretching it at full length before him, sinking down in his chair, finger tips meeting, “of course I knew Jim,” he resumed.  “Jim’s pride is his weak point.  He’s like a boy in that:  he wants everything or nothing.  He’s like all my mother’s children,” said Richie, comfortably analytical, “undisciplined.