"Why do you move in that manner, girl, when you come to see me? I do not like it—do not let me see any more of it!"
"I was coming, father!" was poor Elsie's only answer.
"So I see—at the rate of ten feet an hour! What is the matter with you?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?—do not tell me that, girl! I know better, or you would never carry that gloomy face and move as if you were going to your grandmother's funeral!"
"Indeed there is nothing the matter with me, father; but there soon will be, if you scold me!" and the young girl, making a terrible effort to be cheerful, came up to his side, put her arm around his neck and pressed her lips to his forehead with a movement so pure and fond that it might have softened Nero at the moment of ordering his last wholesale murder. It partially disarmed the pained and querulous father. He put his arm around the daughter's waist, returned the pressure and seemed to be soothed for a moment by resting his head against the bosom that pressed close to him. But the demon that had been roused could only sleep thus temporarily. Directly he put her away, though not roughly, looked her full in the face, and asked:
"Where is your brother?"
"You know he went down to town this morning, and he has not yet come home," was the reply, with an effort not by any means a successful one, to keep the voice from quavering. The practised ear of the father detected the difference between that intonation and the usual unembarrassed utterance of his daughter; and he naturally connected it at once with the restraint of her manner, and noticed an evasion in her answer that might otherwise have escaped him.
"I know he has not come home," he said. "But that was not my question. You have been at Mrs. Hayley's where he spends quite as much of his time as here. Have you seen him?"
Elsie Brand would have given the proudest feature of her personal adornment, at that moment, to be able to lie! She saw that some undefined anxiety with reference to her brother must have moved her father's repeated questions, and naturally she feared the worst—that Carlton's mad words had indeed been overheard, and that even in that brief space of time some messenger of evil had travelled fast and betrayed the fatal secret. If so, the storm was about to burst on the devoted head of her brother, not the less deadly because she must bear the first brunt of its violence. Yes—Elsie Brand would almost have given her right hand to be able to lie at that moment. But her education had been as true as was her nature, and she managed to falter out, yet more suspiciously: