“Just the same as my education may have been a bad thing. It put false ideas into my head. What am I but the daughter of Enos Dugan, the smuggler! I can never be anything else, yet I have entertained aspirations and ambitions. I can never be a lady, for who would accept me as such, knowing all about my parentage? If I had not received an education, if I had been kept at home in the backwoods, if I had never seen you, I might have married one of the many honest fellows who sought to win me—I might have settled down and been content as the wife of a Maine farmer. Now such a thing can never be. I have refused them all. I have dreamed false dreams, and disappointment must be my punishment. Sometimes I rebel against fate. Sometimes I am desperate, and I’ve even thought of—suicide!”
She whispered the last word, and he saw in her deep, dark eyes a look of despair that stabbed him keenly.
“You must not think such things, Miss Dugan!” he quickly exclaimed. “It is not true that your situation is so terrible because of your father.”
“Yes it is!” she declared, almost fiercely. “You know it is, Frank Merriwell! Would you—would you want to—to marry a girl like me?”
She looked at him defiantly, as if she knew he would not.
“Miss Dugan,” he said, “if I really and truly loved you, if I knew you were a good, true girl, I’d marry you even though your father were a red-handed pirate!”
There was no doubt but he meant it. Her bosom heaved, and she gave him a look he never forgot.
“I believe you,” she murmured softly. “It is just as I have ever thought of you, and that is why you have been my hero since the day we first met.”