his position was hard; and, being a man whose training disposed him to
vaguely look for the cause of trial in sin, wondered what he had done
that it had thus befallen him. His memory reverted to the time when, on
an emigrant ship, he had made friends with the man Cameron who that day
had died, and they had agreed to choose their place and cast in their
lot together. It had been part of the agreement that the aunt who
accompanied Bates should do the woman's work of the new home until she
was too old, and that Cameron's child should do it when she was old
enough.

The girl was a little fat thing then, wearing a red hood. Bates, uneasy
in his mind both as to his offer of marriage and her resentment, asked
himself if he was to blame that he had begun by being kind to her then,
that he had played with her upon the ship's deck, that on their land
journey he had often carried her in his arms, or that, in the years of
the hard isolated life which since then they had all lived, he had
taught and trained the girl with far more care than her father had
bestowed on her. Or was he to blame that he had so often been strict and
severe with her? Or was he unjust in feeling now that he had a righteous
claim to respect and consideration from her to an almost greater extent
than the dead father whose hard, silent life had showed forth little of
the proper attributes of fatherhood? Or did the sin for which he was now
being punished lie in the fact that, in spite of her constant wilfulness
and frequent stupidity, he still felt such affection for his pupil as
made him unwilling, as he phrased it, to seek a wife elsewhere and thus
thrust her from her place in the household. Bates had a certain latent
contempt for women; wives he thought were easily found and not
altogether desirable; and with that inconsistency common to men, he
looked upon his proposal to the girl now as the result of a much more
unselfish impulse than he had done an hour ago, before she exclaimed at