He turned round with all the quickness of a young man, for about him there was a peculiar agility which his daughter had inherited. Like his mind, his body was still nimble.
“My darling,” he said, “I should have known your voice anywhere. It has haunted my sleep for years. My darling, thank you for coming back to me, and thank God for preserving you when so many were lost.” Then he threw his arms about her and kissed her.
She shrank from him a little, for by inadvertence he had pressed upon the wound in her forehead.
“Forgive me,” she said; “it is my head. It was injured, you know.”
Then he saw the bandage about her brow, and was very penitent.
“They did not tell me that you had been hurt, Benita,” he exclaimed in his light, refined voice, one of the stamps of that gentility of blood and breeding whereof all his rough years and errors had been unable to deprive him. “They only told me that you were saved. It is part of my ill-fortune that at our first moment of greeting I should give you pain, who have caused you so much already.”
Benita felt that the words were an apology for the past, and her heart was touched.
“It is nothing,” she answered. “You did not know or mean it.”
“No, dear, I never knew or meant it. Believe me, I was not a willing sinner, only a weak one. You are beautiful, Benita—far more so than I expected.”
“What,” she answered smiling, “with this bandage round my head? Well, in your eyes, perhaps.” But inwardly she thought to herself that the description would be more applicable to her father, who in truth, notwithstanding his years, was wonderfully handsome, with his quick blue eyes, mobile face, gentle mouth with the wistful droop at the corners so like her own, and grey beard. How, she wondered, could this be the man who had struck her mother. Then she remembered him as he had been years before when he was a slave to liquor, and knew that the answer was simple.