She looked up: there were tears in her eyes. He blinked.
"My dear," he repeated helplessly. "What is it?" She shook her head, laughing, and yielding to the persuasion of his hand, she sat on the arm of his chair, and leaned against him.
"I'm silly," she said.
But he would not allow that: he triumphed in her sensibility. "No, no," he said. The pressure of his encircling arm assured her that he understood, and she did not try to check her weeping, for she enjoyed it, and all the nameless troubles of her youth seemed to be finding solace. She was surprised at her emotion, and became interested in it: thought dammed the flood, and with the back of her hand she wiped her eyes. Edward Webb continued to hold her firmly while she stared before her, not guiltless of an occasional sniff which had for him the pathos of a cry. Considering herself, she decided that she was strange. Why had she silenced her father? Her glance fell, broodingly, to the papers on his desk. Was it because the hills were her religion, her love for them her form of worship? She liked the notion and saw herself enhanced by it. Her heart beat a little faster; there were depths in her she had not sounded, and her blurred gaze cleared itself in this excitement. Her mind looked inward while her eyes mechanically followed the lines of her father's writing. They were partly concealed by blotting-paper, but some of them she read over and over again, making accompaniment to her thoughts, until their meaning flashed and blinded her to all else. They were words of love, brilliant, coloured words that startled, horrified her. She had read such words in print, but to see them in her father's handwriting seemed to strike life out of her.
Her mind had a curious sensation of lop-sidedness; it was partly numbed, partly acute; she was incapable of remembering to shift her glance, but quite clearly she saw words which told her the letter was written to that woman in the hills. There was no doubt of that. Was he not comparing her face to a sun-bathed peak visible through cloud? She learnt this in half a minute's passing, and then she rose. She was cold, but her mind was once more a whole, and merciless in its conclusions and its indictment.
"Are you going, my dear?" He moved his papers into a little heap.
"Yes."
He did not look at her. "I wish," he said, beating a tattoo on the desk and speaking with an effort—"I wish you would always come to me, Theresa, when you are—when you are not happy."
"Oh!" she cried chokingly, and rushed away.
He found her confusion easy to understand, and he loved her for the reserves so seldom and so delightfully broken.