She was shown up at once, after being announced, into Dr Kenn's study, where he sat amongst piled-up books, for which he had little appetite, leaning his cheek against the head of his youngest child, a girl of three. The child was sent away with the servant and when the door was closed, Dr Kenn said, placing a chair for Maggie,

`I was coming to see you, Miss Tulliver - you have anticipated me - I am glad you did.'

Maggie looked at him with her childlike directness as she had done at the bazaar, and said, `I want to tell you everything. ' But her eyes filled fast with tears as she said it, and all the pent-up excitement of her humiliating walk would have its vent before she could say more.

`Do tell me everything,' Dr Kenn said, with quiet kindness in his grave firm voice. `Think of me as one to whom a long experience has been granted, which may enable him to help you.'

In rather broken sentences - with some effort, at first, but soon with the greater ease that came from a sense of relief in the confidence, Maggie told the brief story of a struggle that must be the beginning of a long sorrow. Only the day before, Dr Kenn had been made acquainted with the contents of Stephen's letter, and he had believed them at once, without the confirmation of Maggie's statement. That involuntary plaint of hers `O I must go,' had remained with him as the sign that she was undergoing some inward conflict.

Maggie dwelt the longest on the feeling which had made her come back to her mother and brother, which made her cling to all the memories of the past. When she had ended, Dr Kenn was silent for some minutes: there was a difficulty on his mind. He rose and walked up and down the hearth with his hands behind him. At last, he seated himself again, and said, looking at Maggie,

`Your prompting to go to your nearest friends - to remain where all the ties of your life have been formed - is a true prompting, to which the Church in its original constitution and discipline responds - opening its arms to the penitent - watching over its children to the last - never abandoning them until they are hopelessly reprobate. And the Church ought to represent the feeling of the community, so that every parish should be a family knit together by Christian brotherhood under a spiritual father. But the ideas of discipline and Christian fraternity are entirely relaxed - they can hardly be said to exist in the public mind: they hardly survive except in the partial, contradictory form they have taken in the narrow communities of schismatics; and if I were not supported by the firm faith that the Church must ultimately recover the full force of that constitution which is alone fitted to human needs, I should often lose heart at observing the want of fellowship and sense of mutual responsibility among my own flock. At present everything seems tending towards the relaxation of ties - towards the substitution of wayward choice for the adherence to obligation which has its roots in the past. Your conscience and your heart have given you true light on this point, Miss Tulliver; and I have said all this that you may know what my wish about you - what my advice to you - would be if they sprang from my own feeling and opinion unmodified by counteracting circumstances.'

Dr Kenn paused a little while. There was an entire absence of effusive benevolence in his manner; there was something almost cold in the gravity of his look and voice. If Maggie had not known that his benevolence was persevering in proportion to its reserve, she might have been chilled and frightened. As it was, she listened expectantly, quite sure that there would be some effective help in his words. He went on.

`Your inexperience of the world, Miss Tulliver, prevents you from anticipating fully, the very unjust conceptions that will probably be formed concerning your conduct - conceptions which will have a baneful effect even in spite of known evidence to disprove them.'

`O, I do - I begin to see,' said Maggie, unable to repress this utterance of her recent pain. `I know I shall be insulted - I shall be thought worse than I am.'


  By PanEris using Melati.

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