“Good-night, Elva.”
She understood him. His eyes and the quiver in his voice spoke to her heart. She clung to his hands when he would have withdrawn them. The look she gave her father checked that gentleman’s contemptuous mutterings.
“I am ashamed of my father, Mr. Wade,” she said, passionately. “I offer you the apologies of our home.”
“Say, look here!” snarled Barrett, this scornful rebelliousness putting his wits to flight, “if that’s the way you feel about me, put on your hat and go with him. I’ll be d—d if I don’t mean it! Go and starve.”
He realized the folly of his outburst as he returned their gaze. But he persisted in his puerile attack.
“Oh, you don’t want her that way, do you?” he sneered. “You want her to bring the dollars that go along with her!”
Then Wade forgot himself.
He wrested one hand from the gentle clasp that entreated him, and would have struck the mouth that uttered the wretched insult. The girl prevented an act that would have been an enormity. She caught his wrist, and when his arm relaxed he did not dare, at first, to look at her. Then he gave her one quick stare of horror and looked at his hand, dazed and ashamed.
Barrett, strangely enough, was jarred back to equanimity by the threat of that blow. He folded his arms, drew himself up, and stood there, the outraged master of the mansion restored to command, silent, cold, rigid, his whole attitude of indignant reproach more effective than all the curses in Satan’s lexicon.
Talk could not help that distressing situation. The young man’s white lips tried to frame the words “I apologize,” but even in his anguish the grim humor of this reciprocation of apology rose before his dizzy consciousness.