"Yes; but purgatory is rather an unhappy medium."
"Well, my dear, I have nothing more to say. I suppose it is natural that you should set aside the counsel of a man who has loved you for nineteen years in favour of the attention of one who has known you about the same number of weeks."
"Papa, you are unjust!" The repressed tears came at last, but they were dried as quickly as they dropped.
"Can't you understand," he continued in a softened tone, "that I would willingly give him anything in return for his kindness—except my eldest daughter?"
"That is a gift he would never value. A society man might do so, but the idea of a young fellow of talent and energy and ambition and brains looking at a little goose like me!"
The Commodore laughed. "No doubt it would be a great hardship for him to look at you; but young men of talent, ambition and that sort of thing are not afraid of hardship. In fact they grow to love it. So you think he would not value the gift?" He laughed again very heartily.
"I am perfectly certain," declared the young girl, with impressive earnestness, "that he will never stoop to ask you for it."
"Then there is nothing more to be said," replied the Commodore, with an air of great relief. "The whole question could not be more satisfactorily settled. You are my own loyal little girl and—and you don't think me a dreadfully cross old bear, do you?"
She went straight to his arms. "How can I help it," she asked, with her customary bright smile, "when you give me such a bearish hug?"
But alone in her room, the smile vanished in a tempest of fast-coming tears. There was a reason for them, but she was unconscious of it then. Later she discovered it to lie in the fact that in her heart of hearts she was not a "loyal little girl" at all, but an "out and out little traitor and rebel."