“Oh Jack! I do so want to see you!” She held out her hand as he lifted his hat.
Their hands remained clasped a second longer, perhaps, than if they had been mere acquaintances, and their eyes were still meeting when their hands had parted.
“Yes—so do I,” answered Ralston, with small regard for grammar. “You look tired, dear. What is it?”
“It’s this life—I don’t know how much longer I can stand it,” answered Katharine, and they began to walk on.
“Has anything happened? Has your father been teasing you again?” John asked, quickly.
“Oh, yes! He leaves me no peace. It’s a succession of pitched battles whenever we meet. He’s made up his mind to know what uncle Robert said to me, and I’ve made up mine that he shan’t. What can I do? Why, Jack, I wouldn’t even tell you!”
“I don’t want to know,” answered Ralston. “Uncle Robert isn’t going to die for twenty years, and I hope he may live thirty. Of course, when he dies, if we’re alive, we shall have heaps of money all round, and your father and grandfather will probably get the biggest shares. But there’ll be plenty for us all. Your father seems to me to have lost his head about it.”
“He really has. It’s the same thing every day. He tells me that I’m all kinds of things—undutiful, and impertinent, and intolerable—altogether a perfect fiend, according to him. Then he threatens me—”
“Threatens you?” repeated John, with a quick frown and a change of tone. “He’d better not!”
“Well—he says that he’ll find means to make me speak, and that sort of thing. I don’t see myself what means he has at his command, I’m sure. I suppose when he’s angry he doesn’t know what he’s saying. So I try to smile—but I don’t like it.”