With a strong effort she controlled herself, looked up and faintly smiled. “I am an orphan,” she gently murmured; “you have been kind and tender to me beyond words; I have let myself love you as a father.”
A spasm crossed his features, the hand he had lifted to lay upon her head fell at his side, he surveyed her with eyes whose despairing fondness told her that her love had been more than met by this desolate childless man. But he did not reply as seemed natural, “Be to me then as a child. I can offer you no mother to guide or watch over you, but one parent is better than none. Henceforth you shall be known as my daughter.” Instead of that he shook his head mournfully, yearningly but irrevocably, and said, “To be your father would have been a dear position to occupy. I have sometimes hoped that I might be so blessed as to call it mine, but that is all past now. Your father I can never be. But I can bless you,” he murmured brokenly, “not as I did that day in your aunt’s little cottage, but silently and from afar as God always meant you should be blessed by me. Good-bye, Paula.”
Then all the deeps in her great nature broke up. She did not weep, but she looked at him with her large dark eyes and the cry in them smote his heart. With a struggle that blanched his face, he kept his arms at his side, but his lips worked in agony, and he slowly murmured, “If after a time your heart loves me like this, and you are willing to bear shadow as well as sunshine with me, come back with your aunt and sit at my hearthstone, not as my child but as a dear and honored guest. I will try and be worthy—” He paused, “Will you come, Paula?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Not soon, not now,” he murmured, “God will show you when.”
And with nothing but a look, without having touched her or so much as brushed her garments with his, he retired again into his room.
XXII.
HOPGOOD.
“Give it an understanding but no tongue.”—Hamlet.