dared to desire it. Therefore I trusted my child. And when I saw that she
looked at me a little shyly when we next met, I only sought to show her the
more tenderness and confidence, telling her all about my plans with the
bells, and my talks with the smith and Mrs. Coombes. She listened with just
such interest as I had always been accustomed to see in her, asking such
questions, and making such remarks as I might have expected, but I still
felt that there was the thread of a little uneasiness through the web of
our intercourse,--such a thread of a false colour as one may sometimes find
wandering through the labour of the loom, and seek with pains to draw from
the woven stuff. But it was for Wynnie to take it out, not for me. And she
did not leave it long. For as she bade me good-night in my study, she said
suddenly, yet with hesitating openness,

"Papa, I told Mr. Percivale that I was sorry I had behaved so badly about
the drawings."

"You did right, my child," I replied. At the same moment a pang of anxiety
passed through me lest under the influence of her repentance she should
have said anything more than becoming. But I banished the doubt instantly
as faithlessness in the womanly instincts of my child. For we men are
always so ready and anxious to keep women right, like the wretched
creature, Laertes, in _Hamlet_, who reads his sister such a lesson on her
maidenly duties, but declines almost with contempt to listen to a word from
her as to any co-relative obligation on his side!

And here I may remark in regard to one of the vexed questions of the
day--the rights of women--that what women demand it is not for men to
withhold. It is not their business to lay the law for women. That women
must lay down for themselves. I confess that, although I must herein seem
to many of my readers old-fashioned and conservative, I should not like to