"Don't awaken my doubts," she cried, despairingly. "I don't know why it is, but you always rouse in me something that makes war."
"I'm sorry if I seem to corrupt you."
"I don't mean that," she hastened to say. "The life which you and your sister represent is the life I love. I was almost resigned to my fate when your sister called upon me. Now I'm all rebellion again. Being here to-night makes me hate all that I am. I hate my very name. I hate Pratt and his horrible house—I almost hate my mother. Sometimes she is so cruel to me. She don't mean to be, but she is."
His face grew reflective, almost stern. "I wish there were some way of taking you out of the world in which you now suffer. I wish—" He paused, checked by the thought of Clarke's claims upon her.
"There is only one way—my grandfather must consent to my release; he rules us all."
This delusion rose like a stone wall at the end of every avenue, and Morton turned to a personal explanation. "I cannot associate what you seem to me now with what you were when I last saw you. What would you have said had I seized you the other day—snatched you from the stairs and ran—"
Her eyes opened wide. "The stairs?"
"Had you no knowledge of following your mother down the stairway after our interview?"
"I knew I was entranced, but I didn't know—What did I do?" She asked this anxiously.
"Nothing." He hastened again to change the current. "We were in hot argument. You came down as peace-maker. I went away cravenly, most impotently, leaving you there like a captive."