"My dear father," she said in a low voice, but with a strange and subtle vibration in it, as if the passion with which she was struggling threatened to burst forth, "you don't know what you ask; you don't know what love is—and you don't know what I am! I didn't know myself until the last few days; until a gradual light shone on the truth and showed me my heart, the heart I once thought would never grow warm with love! Oh, I was a fool! I played with fire, and I have been burned. I am burning still!" She pressed her hand against her bosom, and for an instant the passion within her darted from her eyes and twisted the red, perfectly formed lips. Her hand tightened on his arm, her breath came pantingly, now quickly, now slowly. "Father I have come to you. Most girls go to their mother. I have none. I come to you because I—must! You ask me to put the—the idea out of my head." She laughed a low laugh of self-scorn and bitterness. "Do you think I have not tried to steel, to harden, my heart against this feeling which has been creeping insidiously over me, creeping, stealing gliding like a cloud until it has enveloped me? I have fought against it as never woman fought against the approach of love. The first day—it was the day he took me on the lake—ah, you don't remember, but I—Shall I ever forget it!—the first day my heart went out to him I tried to call it back, to laugh at my weakness, to call myself a fool! And I thought I had succeeded in driving the insidious feeling away. But I was wrong. It was there in my heart already, and day by day, as I saw him, as I heard him speak, the thing grew until I could not see him cross the lawn, hear him speak to the dog, without thrilling, without shivering, shuddering! Father, have pity on me! No, I won't ask for pity! I won't have it! But I ask, I demand, sympathy, your help! Father," she drew nearer to him and looked into his eyes with an awful look of desperation, of broken pride, of the aching craving of love, "you must help me. I love him, I must be his wife—I cannot live without him, I will not!"
He paled and gnawed at his thick lip.
"You talk like a madwoman," he said, hoarsely.
She nodded.
"Yes, I am mad; I know it; I know it! But I shall never be sane again. All my days and all my nights are consumed in this madness. I think of him—I call up his face—ah!" She flung her hands before her face and swayed to and fro as if she were half dazed, half giddy with passion. "And all day I have to fight against the risk, the peril of discovery. To feel the women's eyes on me when he comes near, to feel that their ears are strained to catch the note in my voice which will give me away, place me under their scorn—and to know that, try as I will, my voice, my eyes will grow tender as they rest on him, as I speak to him! To have to hide, to conceal, to crush down my heart while it is aching, throbbing with the torture of my love for him!"
He strode from her, then came back. The sight of the storm within her had moved him: for, after all, this strange girl was his daughter, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone. He swore under his breath and struggled for speech.
"And—and the man Stafford?" he said. "He—he has not said—D—n it! you don't mean to tell me that he is absolutely indifferent, that he—he doesn't care?"
"I'll tell you the truth," she said. "I swore to myself that I would. There is too much at stake for me to conceal anything. He does—not—care for me."
Ralph Falconer uttered a sharp snarl of shame and resentment.
"He doesn't? and yet you—you want to marry him!"