Farwell bent his head over his folded arms.
"But Mrs. McAdam will take you in, Priscilla. After things calm down and the truth is accepted, your people will forgive and forget. You poor child!"
Priscilla closed her lips sharply. Her eyes were very luminous, very tender, as they rested upon Farwell, but her heart knew no pity for her father.
"How old one grows, Master Farwell, in—a night," she said with a quiver in her voice. "I went happily away with Jerry-Jo, quite, quite a girl, only yesterday. I had the feeling of a child trying to make believe I was a woman. I wanted to show my father he could no longer control me as he always had before. I—I wanted to have my way, and then my way brought me to—those black hours of horror when something in me died forever and something new was born. And how strange, Master Farwell, that when I could think at all clear—you stood out as my only friend. I seemed to know how it would be with my father and my poor mother. My father has always expected evil of me, and something in me seemed ever to work against the good of me, to give him cause for believing me wrong. But you saw the good, my friend, and to you I come—a woman, now. I do not know the language of what I feel here"—she pressed her hands to her heart—"but I feel sure you will understand. I cannot stay in Kenmore! I do not want to. Always I have wanted to have a bigger place, a larger opportunity, and even if Kenmore would take me, I will not have Kenmore! Somehow I feel as if I had never belonged here, really. You do not belong here. Oh, Master Farwell, can you not come, too?"
As she spoke, the old, weary look passed for an instant from her eyes; she was a child, daring, yet fearful! Ready to go forward into the dark, but pleading for a trusted hand to hold. And Farwell, who, could she have known, was clinging more to her than she to him, almost groaned the one word:
"No!"
"Why, oh, why, Mr. Farwell? Like father and daughter we could make our way. I think I have never known what a father might be, but you would show me now in my great need."
"Hush!" Farwell's eyes held hers commandingly, entreatingly. "You must hear what I have to say. Why do you think I have stayed in Kenmore? Why I must stay? Have you thought?"
"No." And for the first time in her life Priscilla wondered. Before, the man had been but part of her life; now she wondered about him, with the woman-mind that had come so suddenly and tragically to her.
"No, Master Farwell, why?"