Miss Murdock's glance rested carelessly upon these words for an instant. They aroused in her nothing more than the mild curiosity which attaches to events of palpitating human interest, when they have been congealed in the columns of the daily newspaper and served to palates already sated with sensational verbosity.
"Mary said you wished to speak to me," said the young girl, after a short pause. "I thought I would step in to see you before going to Mr. Sprague's."
"To Sprague's?" inquired Murdock, fixing his keen eyes upon the young girl. "Ah, yes; I remember he spoke of the appointment last night. How is the portrait coming on?"
"It is almost finished. Probably only one or two more sittings, at the most, will be necessary."
Agnes seemed slightly embarrassed by the fixity of her father's searching glance. She settled herself in an armchair and assumed a look of deferent expectancy.
Not a word of affection had passed between father and daughter; not a caress had been interchanged. The relations between this impassive man and his charming daughter were those of well-bred, if somewhat distant, relatives. On the one hand, there was the uniform courtesy of the man of the world toward a woman; on the other, the deference of a young girl of good breeding toward a person much older than herself. But the note of cordial and intimate affection between father and child was absolutely missing.
And yet Agnes Murdock was naturally of an affectionate and expansive nature. During her mother's lifetime the two women had been inseparable companions, united by a strong bond of sympathy.
Mrs. Murdock had been an invalid for many years before her death, and with Agnes had lived either abroad or in the South during much of the time in order to escape the rigors of the northern climate. Thus the father, engrossed as he was with his occupations and his scientific researches, had seen but little of his daughter during her childhood, and had been looked upon by the child almost as a stranger.
When at last, after her mother's death, Agnes, heartbroken at the loss of her only friend, returned to the paternal roof, she was a girl of sixteen. In the first loneliness of her bereavement, when, hungering for human sympathy and consolation, she turned to her father, she received patient and courteous attention, with an offer of all the material comforts and luxuries which wealth could procure; but she failed to find the only thing she needed—a responsive human heart.
And yet, behind the cold and selfish exterior of the chemist, the young girl had touched a chord which had never vibrated before in this strange man's being. It is probable that the feeling awakened in him by his lovely daughter was the nearest approach to an absorbing human affection of which his nature was capable. Perhaps if the child had been sufficiently experienced to read her father's heart she might have persisted in her advances, and thus ultimately have conquered the cold reserve she had at first encountered. But she was proud and impulsive, and, bitterly disappointed in her first attempt to win from her father a demonstration of affection, she withdrew into her isolation, and ever after met his calm courtesy with an equally reserved deference. The abnormal situation, which at first was maintained only by an effort on the part of the young girl, lost with time much of its strangeness, and ultimately crystallized under the potent force of habit, so that it was accepted by the two as the natural outcome of their relationship.