CHAPTER XXII.
Not even the stolid silence with which he received her demonstrative outburst could dissuade Freda from her new belief that this man, whom she had always known as Crispin Bean, was really her father. She wondered, as she looked into his stern, rugged face, and noted the half involuntary tenderness in his eyes as he looked at her, how she could ever have doubted it. She chose to believe now that she had really known it all the time, and that she had only been waiting for him to declare himself. This, however, he was not ready to do even now.
“I am Crispin, Crispin,” he said, while he patted her soothingly on the shoulder, “remember that.”
He did not speak harshly, but even if he had done so she would not have been afraid of him. She was so overjoyed to have found her father, as she still obstinately believed she had done, that she was ready to submit to any condition it might be his fancy to impose.
“Yes, Crispin,” she said meekly, nestling up to his shoulder and looking with shy gladness up in his face, “I will remember anything you tell me, Crispin.”
He put his arm round her with a sudden impulse of tenderness, and Freda fancied, as he looked into her eyes, that he was trying to trace a resemblance to her mother; she fancied, too, by a look of content mingled with sadness which came over his face, that he succeeded.
“I heard you crying out as I came in,” he said at last, abruptly. “Was it my footsteps that frightened you?”
“No,” said Freda hesitatingly.
“What was it, then?”
“A man, a man I have seen about the house before, came up from there,”—she pointed to the hole in the floor—“and frightened me. He said he was my father.”