“I know that you love me.”
“Yes, with a love you cannot understand. You can touch no depths to which I will not follow with that love. But I’d rather a thousand times see you cold in death than hear from your lips the awful words you have spoken in this room here this morning with the face of Jesus looking down upon us from your walls.”
He seemed to sink into a stupor for several moments, and was silent as he gazed into the glowing grate.
At length he said:
“You must take me to your house. I will spend a few days with Ruth and the children.”
Gordon could not face the meeting between his father and Ruth. He accompanied him to the door and gently bade him good-by, promising to call the next day.
A singularly beautiful love the old man had bestowed on Ruth, and she on him; for he was resistless to all the young. When he kissed her as Frank’s bride he seemed to have first fully recovered his spirits from the shadows of his own tragedy. In her great soft eyes with the lashes mirrored in their depths, her dimpled chin and sensitive mouth, her refined and timid nature, the grace and delicacy of her footsteps, he saw come back into life his own lost love. Above all, he was fascinated by her spiritual charm, haunting and vivid. He had never tired of boasting of his son’s charming little wife, and he loved her with a devotion as deep as that he gave his own flesh and blood.
When she entered the room, in spite of his efforts at control, he burst into tears as he kissed her tenderly and slipped his arm softly around her.
“Ruth, my sweet daughter!” he sobbed.
“Father, dear!”