"I care, Dad," said Lorna. "I'm only fifteen and I can't understand everything, but if you'll let me the least little bit take Mother's place, may I try? I'm not much, but perhaps I'm better than nobody, and we two seem all alone in the world."
For the first time in five years the barrier between them was down, and Lorna was hugging her father as in the old happy childish days. To know all is to forgive all, and her resentment against his treatment of her turned into a deep pitying love. She would never be frightened of him again. A new impulse seemed to have come to her. If she could in any way comfort him for what he had suffered, it would be something to live for.
"He's my father, and I'll stick to him through thick and thin," she said to herself fiercely, as she went to bed that night. "I don't know who this enemy is, but if ever I meet him I'll hate him and all belonging to him. I say it, and I don't go back on my word. I'll be my own witness as nobody else is present. Lorna Carson, you've taken up a feud and you've got to carry it through. May all the bad luck in the world come down upon you if you break your oath."
CHAPTER VIII
At Pompeii
Lorna returned to Fossato feeling as if she had passed through a great crisis. The short week-end and its revelation seemed to have added years to her life. She had never been a typical specimen of "sparkling girlhood," but her new knowledge made her more sedate than ever. It brought her both gain and loss: gain in the fact that she now shared her father's confidence, and could help him to bear his heavy burden, and loss in the sense of a yet wider division between herself and her schoolmates. She realized now, only too bitterly, why her father so persistently shunned all English people. It would surely have been better to have placed her at an Italian school than among girls of her own nationality. Lorna, naturally morbid and over-sensitive, shrank yet deeper into her shell, and became more sphinx-like than ever. Her one bright spot at the Villa Camellia was her devotion to her buddy. Half a dozen other girls had at various periods tried to "take Lorna up," but all had promptly dropped her, declaring that they could not get any further, and that she was a solitary "hermit-crab." Irene, after one or two ventures, realized that Lorna was utterly reserved and uncommunicative, but was content to continue the friendship on a one-sided basis, giving confidences, but receiving none in return. She was a little laughed at in certain quarters on the subject of her chum.
"Hope you like crab sauce."
"We're tickled to bits at the pair of you."
"It won't last long."