"She wouldn't leave me! I could have settled her somewhere in some quiet place where she'd have been quit at least of shady rotten people, but she wouldn't have it. She's stuck to me always through good times and bad. She's kept my heart up when I'd have been ready to cut my throat if I'd been alone. She's been the—bravest and faithfullest—Well I—And look at her! Look at her now! Think of what she's had to see and know—the people she's had to live with—and look at her! Has any of it stuck to her? Has it cheapened her in any littlest way? No, by God! She has come through it all like a—like a Sister of Charity through a city slum—like an angel through the dark!"
The Irishman broke off speaking, for his voice was beyond control, but after a moment he went on again more calmly—
"This boy, this young Benham, is a fool, but he's not a mean fool. She'll make a man of him. And, married to him, she'll have the comforts that she ought to have and the care and—freedom. She'll have a chance to live the life that she had a right to, among the sort of people she has a right to know. I'm not afraid for her. She'll do her part and more. She'll hold up her head among duchesses, that girl. I'm not afraid for her."
He said this last sentence over several times, standing before the window and staring out at the sun upon the treetops. "I'm not afraid for her.... I'm not afraid for her." He seemed to have forgotten that the younger man was in the room, for he did not look towards him again or pay him any attention for a long while. He only gazed out of the window into the fresh morning sunlight, and his face worked and quivered and his lean hands chafed restlessly together before him.
But at last he seemed to realise where he was, for he turned with a sudden start, and he stared at Ste. Marie frowning as if the younger man were some one he had never seen before. He said—
"Ah, yes, yes! You were wanting to go out into the garden. Yes, quite so! I—I was thinking of something else. I seem to be absent-minded of late. Don't let me keep you here!" He seemed a little embarrassed and ill at ease, and Ste. Marie said—
"Oh, thanks! There's no hurry. However, I'll go, I think. It's after eleven. I understand that I'm on my honour not to climb over the wall or burrow under it or batter it down. That's understood. I——"
He felt that he ought to say something in acknowledgment of O'Hara's long speech about his daughter; but he could think of nothing to say, and besides, the Irishman seemed not to expect any comment upon his strange outburst. So, in the end, Ste. Marie nodded and went out of the room without further ceremony.
He had been astonished almost beyond words at that sudden and unlooked-for breakdown of the other man's impregnable reserve, and dimly he realised that it must have come out of some very extraordinary nervous strain; but he himself had been in no state to give the Irishman's words the attention and thought that he would have given them at another time. His mind, his whole field of mental vision had been full of one great fact—the girl was to be married to young Arthur Benham. The thing loomed gigantic before him, and, in some strange way, terrifying. He could neither see nor think beyond it. O'Hara's burst of confidence had reached his ears very faintly, as if from a great distance—poignant but only half comprehended words, to be reflected upon later in their own time.
He stumbled down the ill-lighted stair with fixed, wide, unseeing eyes, and he said one sentence over and over aloud—as the Irishman standing beside the window had said another.