"Isn't that proof?" he asked back.
"You are very, very good to me." Still she held her ground, watching him with her strange mingling of diffidence and conscious power. "Tris—I do want something awfully—something that will make me perfectly content——"
He smiled.
"Then it's yours, if a poor Major can squeeze it out of his official fortune."
"I want my father here—with us." She saw no change in him, and yet, absorbed as she was in her own appeal, she felt the sudden check in his breathing, the tightening of the muscles under her hand. She became reasonlessly frightened. "Tris, is it too much to ask?"
He turned and continued to walk on.
"No—I meant what I said just now. Only—I don't understand, Anne—in the old days—before the accident—you were so afraid of him. You dreaded him—I think you hated him——"
"Don't!" she interrupted. "You can't think how it hurts to be reminded of all that. Yes, he frightened me. He made us all unhappy. Now he is helpless—broken. Sometimes, looking back, it seems to me that we were to blame—that perhaps mother was not the wife for him—that she didn't understand——"
He crushed back the exclamation that had risen to his lips. He dared not admit even to himself that it had been one of bitter impatience.
"That doesn't seem quite fair, Anne. He may have been ill, mad, if you like. It's the best one can say."