 Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them,
crush them; do Thou as I would do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the
impious tower of stone she built up to scale Heaven.
    »Have you finished, Arthur, or have you anything more to say to me? I think
there can be nothing else. You have been short, but full of matter!«
    »Mother, I have yet something more to say. It has been upon my mind, night
and day, this long time. It is far more difficult to say than what I have said.
That concerned myself; this concerns us all.«
    »Us all! Who are us all?«
    »Yourself, myself, my dead father.«
    She took her hands from the desk; folded them in her lap; and sat looking
towards the fire, with the impenetrability of an old Egyptian sculpture.
    »You knew my father infinitely better than I ever knew him; and his reserve
with me yielded to you. You were much the stronger, mother, and directed him. As
a child, I knew it as well as I know it now. I knew that your ascendency over
him was the cause of his going to China to take care of the business there,
while you took care of it here (though I do not even now know whether these were
really terms of separation that you agreed upon); and that it was your will that
I should remain with you until I was twenty, and then go to him as I did. You
will not be offended by my recalling this, after twenty years?«
    »I am waiting to hear why you recall it.«
    He lowered his voice, and said, with manifest reluctance, and against his
will:
    »I want to ask you, mother, whether it ever occurred to you to suspect -«
    At the word Suspect, she turned her eyes momentarily upon her son, with a
dark frown. She then suffered them to seek the fire, as before; but with the
frown fixed above them, as if the sculptor of old Egypt had indented it in the
hard granite face, to frown for ages.
    »- that he had any secret remembrance which caused him trouble of mind -
remorse? Whether you ever observed anything in his conduct suggesting that; or
ever spoke to him upon it, or ever heard him hint at such a thing?«
    »I do not understand what kind of secret remembrance you mean to infer that
your father was a prey to,« she returned, after a
