The old man's appeal was intensely pathetic in its simplicity, and would under ordinary conditions have touched a harder heart than his daughter's; but she remained deaf to it; her manner was icily cold; the fond embrace was not returned, and though she kissed him, it was done mechanically, and the touch of her lips chilled him and made him shiver with apprehension. Her nature seemed frozen under some strange spell, and the old man stood helpless and bewildered by her side.
"Won't you confide in your old dad, May?" he asked again.
"My dear father, it hurts me to see you crying; but I cannot, I cannot do what you ask."
"You mean that you cannot trust your father, May."
"It's not that, father. You do not understand," and she restlessly turned her head away and almost moaned. "I wonder if Mrs. Eastwood is coming up?"
"If you want her, my dear, I will tell her," said the old man, now becoming visibly annoyed.
"Yes, I do, father. I do want her," and she lay back again and covered her face.
Goody left the room without another word in an agitated state and, meeting Mrs. Eastwood on the stairs, told her May wanted her, then he quitted the house and took a cab back to the "Orient" to await the arrival of the boys. He reached the hotel not in the best of humours. He was one of those simple-minded men unused to the analysis of complicated emotions, and by turns his grief had changed to anger, his anger to complaint. Fretfully he muttered to himself that it was too bad that after all these years of unchequered happiness a stranger should step in and destroy everything at one blow; that he should be made to feel he was no longer an element in his daughter's happiness. And his anger increased as his sense of injury grew stronger, until he clenched his fist and thundered to the empty room:
"May, you have turned against me; you have shown me you no longer want me. Well, then, I will shew you I no longer want—"
Here he came to a sudden pause. His voice trembled, his anger wavered, for, by a sudden wave of memory, he caught himself listening again to the voice of his dying wife as she handed over to him the care of the child whose advent they had welcomed so much in the long past. At the magic touch of the dead woman's memory his rage disappeared, his heart softened, and tears coursed down his cheeks, and he vowed not to forsake his daughter yet, and prayed for a way out of his difficulty.