"Rest! You may as well tell me to sleep!" she exclaimed. Then her tone altered abruptly, and for the first time, she seemed able to penetrate beyond her own selfish absorption. "Oh, you poor papa, how very old you look!" she said.
Taking his head in her arms, she pressed it to her bosom and cried softly for a minute. "It's all my fault—everything is my fault, but I can't help it. I'm made that way." Then pushing him from her suddenly, she sprang to her feet and began walking up and down in her restless excited manner.
"Let me get you a glass of wine, Alice," he said, "you are trembling all over."
She shook her head. "It isn't that—it isn't that. It's the awful—awful money. If it wasn't for the money I could go on. Oh, I wish I'd never spent a single dollar! I wish I'd always gone in rags!"
Again he forced her back into her chair and again, after a minute of quiet, she rose to her feet and broke into hysterical sobs.
"All that I have is yours, Alice, you know that," he said in the effort to soothe her, "and, besides, your own property is hardly less than two hundred thousand."
"But Uncle Richard won't give it to me," she returned angrily. "I wrote and begged him on my knees and he still refused to let me have a penny more than my regular income. It's all tied up, he says, in investments, and that until I am twenty-one it must remain in his hands."
With a frantic movement, she reached for her muff, and drew from it a handful of crumpled papers, which she held out to him. "Geoffrey found these to-night and they brought on the quarrel," she said. "Yesterday he gave me this bracelet and he seems to think I could live on it for a month!" She stretched out her arm, as she spoke, and showed him a glittering circle of diamonds immediately below the blue finger marks. "There's a sable coat still that he doesn't know a thing of," she finished with a moan.
Bending under the lamp, he glanced hurriedly over the papers she had given him, and then rose to his feet still holding them in his hand.
"These alone come to twenty thousand dollars, Alice," he said with a gentle sternness.