Her gaze swept quite past him, ascended to the pitying brown eyes in her mother's portrait; and though she grew white as her Undine vesture, and he saw her shudder, her voice was unshaken.
"I cannot tell you."
"Representing your mother's authority, I demand an answer."
After an instant, she said:
"Though you were twenty times my guardian, I shall not tell you, sir."
She seemed like some marble statue, which one might hack and hew in twain, without extorting a confession.
"Then you force me to a very shocking and shameful conclusion."
Was there, she wondered, any conclusion so shameful as the truth, which at all hazard she was resolved for her mother's sake to hide?
"You are secretly meeting and arranging to correspond with some vagrant lover whom you blush so acknowledge."
"Lover! Oh, merciful God! When I need a father, and a father's protecting name—when I am heart-sick for my mother, and her shielding healing love—how can you cruelly talk to me of a lover? What right has a nameless, homeless waif to think of love? God grant me a father and a mother, a stainless name, and I shall never need, never wish, never tolerate a lover! Do not insult my misery."