“You are wise and reasonable,” said Miriam, with a sigh; “but it seems to me to be cause for mourning, too, that a warm, loving, beating human heart must survive in the ice of your logic, with only a memory and a hope—which may become frozen, too.”
“Matters may turn out better than you think,” was Mary Faust’s reply. “Meanwhile, your father is waiting in the next room. Will you go to him?”
“Dearest father!” exclaimed Miriam rising. “Yes, there are more loves than one.”
She wiped the tears from her cheeks, and with the rose-wreaths still clinging about her, followed her friend into the shadowy spaces of the laboratory.
From the gloom the sturdy figure of the white-headed old contractor started forward, grasped his daughter by the shoulders with trembling hands, and gazed into her face with a devouring look.
“Me own colleen!” he cried in a breaking voice. “Come back safe and alive to her old daddy! Glory be to God and all the blessed saints! Oh, honey, honey, don’t ye never be doin’ the likes again. Sure, the heart was most bruck in me!” He held her to him with an almost desperate clutch. “Take all ye want in this world—marry any man ye like—but, stay where the old daddy that loves ye can feast his eyes on ye.”
“Darling daddy!” murmured she; “You’re all I have left; thank God for you.”
“Long live Oireland!” rejoined the old man fervently but incoherently.
Two tall figures stood in the background; one of them began to come forward, not quickly, but with an inevitableness like the drawing of planet to planet. The other, with a cigar between his fingers, watched the scene with an amused but genuine interest.
Miriam did not observe the newcomer till he was close upon her. Without directly looking at him, she involuntarily drew back a little, with a feeling that no outsider should intrude upon this meeting. At this moment Mary Faust touched a button, and the room was filled with light.