“And I also know what father is, Phineas. I can understand. It is nothing that you have done. But it all seems to be beginning over again, and I hoped it was ended.”
“I guess it’s like the fire in old Ward’s peat bog,” he replied, a wrinkle of humour about his eyes. “It has been burning for twenty years underground and breaks out every little while. I can sympathise with Ward’s peat bog,” he added. “Every now and then, when I think it’s cold and dead and stamped out—my own particular smoulder, you know—there’s a breath of remembrance, when I see you, and I’m all afire again inside. Hard case, isn’t it?”
He didn’t allow his tone to be too serious.
“It isn’t well to speak of such things, Phineas. And not in that way! Somehow, it hasn’t come right for you and me. We mustn’t blame each other. It hasn’t seemed to be our fault.” She cast a glance at the waggons toiling up the street. He gazed at the old man, who had paused half way across the lawn and was querulously shouting “Daughter!”
The Squire leaned a bit further over the fence.
“I guess it has been ten years, Sylvena,” he said, “since I’ve let you see my fire break through the crust. I didn’t intend to let it show again, for I know your heart is tender. I don’t blame you for feeling that a daughter owes much to a widowed father. I’d be the last to break up a family. I haven’t any right to blame you. Don’t worry about me, ever. But I can’t seem to forget, and while I keep on loving you I am having an awfully good time all by myself doing so.”
With frank impulsiveness the woman came close to the fence and patted his big hand that clutched the iron paling. But this frankness in her action, her demeanour, and in the free and honest gaze she gave him, did not console him.
“Still you’re ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ Sylvena,” he said, half whimsically, half bitterly.
The old man had returned part way down the broad lawn, and was yelping “Daughter!” in his thin voice with increasing impatience.
She smiled at the Squire as though the jest of his last words were one well understood between them.