A shadow fell over his face, and the sad eyes were like clouded stars.
"You know better, sir! I am just what I always was! It is you who are so changed! Once you were my friend; my guardian! Once you were kind, and guided me; but now you are stern, and bitter, and tyrannical!" She spoke passionately, and tears, which she bravely tried to force back, rolled swiftly down her cheeks. His light touch on her shoulder tightened until it seemed a hand of steel, and, with an expression which she never forgot, even in after years, he answered:
"Tyrannical! Not to you, child!"
"Yes, sir; tyrannical! cruelly tyrannical! Because I dared to think and act for myself, you have cast off—utterly! You try to see how cold and distant you can be; and show me that you don't care whether I live or die, so long as I choose to be independent of you. I did not believe that you could ever be so ungenerous!" She looked up at him with swimming eyes. He smiled down into her tearful face, and asked:
"Why did you defy me, child?"
"I did not, sir, until you treated me worse than the servants; worse than you did Charon even."
"How?"
"How, indeed! You left me in your own house without one word of good-by, when you expected to be absent an indefinite time. Did you suppose that I would remain there an hour after such treatment?"
He smiled again, and said in the low, musical tone which she had always found so difficult to resist.
"Come back, my child. Come back to me!"