“Did David send for me?”
The cry smote the good man now with its sound of irrepressible joy. Short as their interview had been, he felt ever more strongly how clumsy were even his well-meaning fingers upon this delicate thing—a woman’s heart. “One man only,” he said to himself, “has the right to play on that lute—that is the man she loves.” And aloud:
“No, David does not know,” he replied.
“Then why am I here-what will he think?”
She looked wildly round, almost as if she would have started running back all those miles to her hiding-place. The rector laid a restraining hand upon her shoulder. She turned on him fiercely.
“You should not have brought me here!”
“My child, you should never have left us!”
When there was that tone in Horatio Tutterville’s voice and that look in his kind eye, his rarely exercised authority made itself irresistibly felt. Ellinor’s reproachful anger was turned to a filial pleading:
“Dear uncle, how could I remain, how can I remain?... after ... after——” Her lips trembled: they could not frame the words of the odious charge which still lay against her fair fame.
“And have we been so wanting towards you, Ellinor, all this time, that you feel there is not one of us to whom you could give your confidence?”