A Fountain Sealed

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

"Do you quite realize the arrogance of that attitude?"

"I accept all its responsibility, Imogen."

"But we cannot accept it in you," said Imogen, her voice sinking to the hard quiver of reality that Jack well knew;—"we can't fail in our duty to him because you have always failed in yours. We are in no way bound to consider you-who never considered him."

"Imogen," said her mother, raising her eyes with a look of command; "you forget yourself. Be still."

Imogen's face froze to stone. Such words, such a look, she had never met before. She stood silent, helpless, rage and despair at her heart.

But Mr. Potts did not lag behind his duty. His hand still wrapped, Moses-like, in his beard, his eyes bent in holy wrath upon his hostess, he rose to his feet, and Mrs. Potts, in recounting the scene—one of the most thrilling of her life—always said that never had she seen Delancy so superbly true, never had she seen blood so tell.

"I must say to you, Mrs. Upton, with the deepest pain," he said, "that I agree with Miss Imogen. I must inform you, Mrs. Upton, that you have no right, legal or moral, to bind us by your own shortcoming. Miss Imogen and I may do our duty without your help or consent."

"I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Potts," Valerie replied. She had, unseeingly, taken up her pen again and, with a gesture habitual to her, was drawing squares and crosses on the blotter under her hand. The lines trembled. The angles of the squares would not meet.

"But I have still something to say to you, Mrs. Upton," said Mr. Potts; "I have still to say to you that, much as you have shocked and pained us in the past, you have never so shocked and pained us as now. We had hoped for better things in you,—wider lights, deeper insights, the unsealing of your eyes to error and wrong in yourself; we had hoped that sorrow would work its sacred discipline and that, with your daughter's hand to guide you, you were preparing to follow, from however far a distance, in the footsteps of him who is gone. This must count for us, always, as a dark day of life, when we have seen a human soul turn wilfully from the good held out to it and choose deliberately the evil. I speak for myself and for Mrs. Potts—and in sorrow rather than in wrath, Mrs. Upton. I say nothing of your daughter; I bow my head before that sacred filial grief. I—"

But here, suddenly, quiet, swift, irresistible as a flame, Jack rose from his place. It seemed one suave, unbroken motion, that by which he laid a hand on Mr. Potts's shoulder, a hand on Mrs. Potts's shoulder—she had risen in wonder and alarm at the menacing descent upon her lord—laid a hand on each, swept them to the door, opened it, swept them out, and shut the door upon them. Then he turned and leaned upon it, his arms folded.