"Father!" she cried, bending forward and gazing at him with strange eyes. "Father! By what right and on what authority do you make these accusations? That man, I know, was all that innate gentleness and upright manhood could make any man. His nobility was not of wealth or title, but of—"
"Nonsense!" Flint interrupted. "Nobility, eh? Read that, will you?"
Leering, despite himself, he handed the paper across the table to his daughter.
"Those marked passages," said he. "And remember, this is only the beginning. Wait till all the facts are known, the whole conspiracy laid bare and everything exposed to public view! Then tell me, if you can, that he is poor but noble! Bah! Sunday-school dope, that! Noble, yes!"
Catherine sat there staring at the paper, a minute, as though quite unable to decipher a word. Through a kind of wavering mist that seemed to swim before her eyes, she vaguely saw the words: "Socialist White Slaver!" but that these bore any relation to the man she remembered, back there at the sugar-house, had not yet occurred to her mind. She simply could not grasp the significance of the glaring headlines. And, turning a blank gaze on her father's face, she stammered:
"Why—why do you give me this? What has this got to do with—me? With him?"
"Everything!" snarled the Billionaire, violently irritated by his daughter's seeming obtuseness. "Everything, I tell you! That man, that strong and noble hero of yours, is this man! This white slaver! This wild beast—this Socialist—this Anarchist! Do you understand now, or don't you? Do you grasp the truth at last, or is your mind incapable of apprehending it?"
He had risen, and now was standing there at his side of the table, shaking with violent emotion, his glasses awry, face wrinkled and drawn, hands twitching. His daughter, making no answer to his taunts, sat with the paper spread before her on the table. A wine glass, overset, had spilled a red stain—for all the world like the workers' blood, spilled in war and industry for the greater wealth and glory of the masters—out across the costly damask, but neither she nor Flint paid any heed.
For he was staring only at her; and she, now having mastered herself a little, though her full breast still rose and fell too quickly, was struggling to read the slanderous lies and foul libels of the blue-penciled article.
Silently she read, paling a little but otherwise giving no sign to show her father how the tide of her thought was setting. Twice over she read the article; then, pushing the paper back, looked at old Flint with eyes that seemed to question his very soul—eyes that saw the living truth, below.