"Why do you say temporarily?"
"Because, if I loved any man well enough to run away with him I should stay with him forever. You might sever us 'temporarily,' but I should go back to him as soon as I went twenty-one and marry him over again," and her face flushed crimson, and she lifted her brimming eyes to her father and added:
"But all the time I should love you. I should never say farewell to you. To the end of my life, throughout all eternity, I should be your daughter, and you would be my dear, dear Father. Is not that so? Yes, it is! It is!"
He looked at her with a swelling heart full of intense admiration and unbounded love. He could have struck and kissed her at the same moment, but he could find no words to answer her loving question. So he lifted his hand from her proud, indignant form and, with such a sob as may come from a breaking heart, he turned from her to go to his study. She could not bear it. When the parlor door shut, that piteous cry was still in her ears, and she hastened to the study after him. But just as she reached the door she heard the key turn in its lock.
Then she fled upstairs and found her aunt lying still in the semidarkness of her room. "Aunt! Aunt!" she cried in a passion of tears, "I cannot bear it! No, I cannot bear it! My poor Father! Someone ought to think of his feelings. Yes, indeed they ought."
"It seems to me, Marion, that you are busy enough in that way. What is the matter with the Minister now?"
Then Marion, with many tears and protestations, related her conversation with her father, and Mrs. Caird listened as one destitute of much sympathy, and, when she spoke, her words were not more comforting.
"You are a half-and-half creature, Marion; neither here nor there, neither this, that, nor what not. Why didn't you speak plainly to him as your brother did? Mind this! You can't move the Minister with tears and a mouthful of good words. Not you! He will keep up his threep like a gamecock till he dies with it in his last crow. I'm telling you—heed me or not—I am telling you the truth."
"No, he will not, Aunt."
"Such to-and-fro words as you gave him! He'll build his own way strong as Gibraltar upon them. See if he doesn't. Your fight is all to do over, but, as you have taken the matter in your own hands, you and him for it."