"I did not mean to frighten you!" he interjected. "I only followed an impulse."
"Yes, one of your impulses, Jack," she remarked, comprehendingly. "Father and I have been so much together—indeed, we have never been apart—that there is more than filial sympathy of feeling between us. There is something akin to telepathy. We often divine each other's thoughts. I think that he understood what had taken place between us on the pass; that you had brought on some sort of a crisis in our relations. It was then that he told me who you were, as you know. Then he talked of you and your father—you still wish to hear?"
"Yes!"
"And you will listen in silence?"
"Yes!"
"I will grant your defence of your father, but you will not argue? I am giving what you ask, in justice to myself; I am giving my reasons, my feelings."
"No, I will not argue."
Their tones were so low that a passer-by would have hardly been conscious that they were talking; but had the passer-by caught the pitch he might have hazarded many guesses, every one serious.
"Then, I will try to make clear all that father said. You were the image of your father—a smile and a square chin. The smile could charm and the chin could kill. He liked you for some things that seemed to spring from another source, as he called it; but these would vanish and in the end you would be like your father, as he knew when he saw you break Pedro Nogales's arm. And you gloried in your strength; as you told me on the pass and as I saw for myself in the duel. And to you, father said, victory was the supreme guerdon of life. It ran triumphant and inextinguishable in your veins."
"I—" he said, chokingly; but remembered his promise not to argue.