Finally it was to her father she went, when he returned in the late afternoon.
“I know you’re tired, father,” she hesitated at the door of his office as she saw him stretched, coatless, upon the lounge, “but I’d like to see you a little while—and it’s important.”
“Come in, Rhoda. What is it? The Mallard child? Not getting worse, is it?”
“No. It’s—it’s about me. I’ve made up my mind to-day, father, that I won’t marry Mr. Delavan.”
He sat up and across his face and into his eyes leaped the expression of pleased satisfaction that she had known would shine there at her news. But all he said was:
“You’ve decided wisely, I think.” Nevertheless, his professional eye had already noted the signs still lingering in her countenance of her afternoon’s vigil alone with her heart, and if she could have known what compassion and tenderness stirred in his breast she would have been surprised and comforted.
“But that’s not all, father—such a queer thing happened as I was coming home,” she hurried on, trying hard to speak in a matter-of-fact tone. Long ago, in her early girlhood, when she had first discovered in her father an inclination to make a companion of her, in her pride and eagerness to be felt worthy of such honor she had unconsciously begun to imitate toward him his own unemotional manner toward her. And the habit had grown upon her of thinking that in his presence she must repress any show of feeling.
She told him in detail how she met the runaway slave, how she secreted him in the cave and then encountered Jefferson Delavan. But she glossed over this part of the incident, saying only:
“And I told him at once I had hidden the man and that I would not give him up, no matter what the marshal might do, and when the men came and called to him from the road he answered that the slave wasn’t there and wrote quickly on an old envelope an agreement to give the nigger his freedom. He said he’d send the legal papers to me to-night and then he took the others away, so that they didn’t see me at all.”
She ceased speaking abruptly and silence fell upon them. Dr. Ware was gazing fixedly at her as he searched the meager words of her recital, trying to find in them some revelation of what really had passed between the two lovers. He felt that there must have been some brief but determined conflict of wills for the possession of the slave, and he guessed that Rhoda had won by feminine wile of love. The episode drove in upon him the unwelcome conviction that the feeling between them, notwithstanding the shortness of their acquaintance, must be deep and genuine. But he remembered how suddenly and irrevocably he himself had fallen in love in the days of his young manhood and, recalling certain indications of character in Jeff Delavan’s countenance, he thought uneasily, “I wonder if he’ll take ‘no’ for an answer, after all.” He came back to her story.