She threw her arms around his neck and there was a sob in her voice as she exclaimed: “Father, I shall never marry!”
He smoothed her brown hair and laid his hand on her shoulder saying, “Ah, that means you will surely be married within a year!”
She shook her head. “No, I mean it, father! I shall never marry!”
“My dear, I should be sorry if you did not,” he answered with dignity, and with a strong note of disapproval in his voice. “For what is a woman who does not marry and bear children? Nothing! She is a rose bush that never flowers, a grape vine that never fruits. She is useless, a weed that cumbers the earth. No, my daughter, you must marry, or displease your father very much.”
Marguerite lay awake long that night, trying to decide what she ought to do. Her father’s words gave sight to a blind, vague misgiving she had already felt, but at the same time she could not believe that Wellesly meant less than his words when he told her that he loved her and wished to make her his wife.
“Why should he propose to me if he does not wish to marry me?” she argued with herself, “and why should he want to marry me if he does not love me? No, he surely loves me. Perhaps father is right about the Frenchmen. He knows them, but he does not understand the Americans. They always feel so sure about things, and they do everything as if there was no possibility of failure. But I wish I knew if I love him! I suppose I do, for I felt so pleased that he should wish to marry me. But I don’t have to decide at once. I’ll wait till he comes to Las Plumas again before I give him an answer.”
She debated whether or not she ought to tell her father and ask his advice, but she feared that in his mind other considerations would outweigh the one she felt to be the chief, and she decided to say nothing to him until she knew her own mind in the matter. “If I refuse him,” she said to herself, “there will be no reason for me to say anything about it, and it wouldn’t be fair to Mr. Wellesly for me to tell father or any one else that he had proposed to me. Besides, father might possibly speak of it outside, and I couldn’t bear to think that people were gossiping about it. No, I will not say anything, unless I should decide that I want to marry him. Then I will ask father if he thinks I’d better.”
The next morning she woke with a sudden start, all her consciousness filled with an overwhelming desire to love and be loved, to be all of life to some one who would be more than life to her. She sat up, panting, pressing her hand to her heart. At once her thoughts leaped to Wellesly.
“He loves me, he has told me so, and surely this is love I feel now, and for him. I suppose—I do—love him.”
She lifted her nightgown above her bare feet and stood beside little Paul’s crib. With her disheveled hair falling in waving masses around her face she bent over him and lightly kissed his forehead.