“It was all a falsehood. He kept asking me if I were not writing a book. He thought one had only to write a book to become famous. It seemed so easy not to oppose the idea, and little by little I fell into the habit of talking about ‘the book’ as if it were really being written. I did not try to explain to myself what I was doing. I simply drifted with the current of his desires and hopes. It may seem strange to you that a man like my father should have had such ambitions, and stranger still that he should have ever dreamed I could realize them. But one has strange fancies alone with one’s self out on the mountains, and the isolation and self-concentration of the life give an intensity to any desire or expectation that you, who live in an ever-changing world, cannot understand.”
Miss Arnold looked at the girl curiously. She wondered for the first time if there was any excuse for her. She had a singularly strong moral nature herself, and she could not quite understand this girl’s weakness and deceit. The fact that she loved her father so deeply only added to the mystery.
She arose. “If I were you”—she began, coldly, but Miss Oldham stopped her.
“It is all finished now,” she said. She, too, had arisen, and was standing against the door, looking down and speaking in the monotonous tone of someone reciting a lesson.
“I have decided, and I shall go to my father, and I shall say, ‘I have deceived you; I have neither courage nor honesty. There might have been an excuse for another girl—a girl who did not understand you or who did not love you, or who did not know just how much her success meant to you. For me there is none. I, who knew how strange the idea at first seemed to you of your daughter’s being an educated, accomplished girl; I, who knew how little by little the idea became a passion with you, how proud and how fond you were of her, how you worked and prayed that she might be something different and better than the rest—I, who knew all this, have still deceived you. There is but one thing I dare ask you, Will you not let me go back to the mountain with you, and serve you and be to you the daughter I have not been as yet?’”
She stopped suddenly and looked at Miss Arnold.
“That is what I must do, is it not?” she asked, dully.
Miss Arnold went over to her.
“That is what you must do,” she said, gently.
It was almost two weeks later when Miss Arnold, coming in from a long walk, found a letter lying on her table. It bore an unfamiliar postmark, and the superscription had evidently been written in great haste or agitation. She tore it open with a feeling of apprehension.