"It's always so! The lover always drives the parent out of the young folks' hearts. For this man—that you haven't known more than a few months, I suppose—you'd give up your father to worse than the gallows—to the misery of a life sentence—and be glad, maybe, to see the last of him! If it was him or me, you would save him—and perhaps you're in the right of it. I wish," said the man, turning away his face—"I wish to God that I'd never come back to England, nor seen the face of my girl again!"
Cynthia had been physically incapable hitherto of stemming the flow of his words; but now, although she was trembling with excitement and sorrow and indignation, she answered her father's accusation resolutely.
"You are wrong, father. I will not sacrifice you to him. But you must not expect me to sacrifice him to you either. My heart is large enough to hold you both."
There was a pathos in the tone of her last few words which impressed even Westwood's not very plastic nature. He turned towards her, noting with half-unconscious anxiety the whiteness of the girl's lips, the shadow that seemed to have descended upon her eyes. He put out his rough hand and touched her daintily gloved fingers.
"Don't be put out by what I say, my girl! If I speak sharp, it's because I feel deep. I won't be hard on any one you care for, I give you my word; but it'll be the best thing for you to be fair and square with me and tell me all about him. Are you going to marry him?"
"He wishes to marry me," said Cynthia, yielding, with a sigh; "but there has been an arrangement—a sort of family arrangement, I understand—by which he must—ought to marry a young lady in two years, when she is twenty or twenty-one, if she consents and if she is strong enough. She is ill now, and she does not seem to care for him. That is all I know. I have promised to marry him if he is free at the end of the two years."
It sounded a lame story—worse, when she told it, than when she had discussed it with Hubert Lepel or wept over it in her own room. Westwood uttered a growl of anger.
"And you're at his beck and call like that! He is to take you or leave you as he pleases! Pretty state of matters for a girl like you! Why, with your face and your pretty voice and your education, I should think that you could have half Lunnon if you chose!"
"Not I," said Cynthia, laughing with a little of her old spirit—"or, if I had, it would be the wrong half, father. Besides, Mr. Lepel is not to blame. He—he would marry me to-morrow, I believe, if I would allow it; it was I that arranged to wait. I would rather wait. Why should I marry anybody before I have seen the world?"
"Where does Mr. Lepel live, Cynthy?" said Westwood slowly, as if he had not been attending very much to what she said.