Her answer wrung a groan from him.
"Phyllis, Phyllis!" he exclaimed. Then in an altered voice, full of irritated reasonableness, he went on: "Do you realize that we could have had the same--well, disagreement--over that Pastor fellow you were engaged to? Wouldn't you have been just as wilful in his case--just as sure? Wouldn't it have been the same with Baron von Piller if I had objected violently at the time you engaged yourself to him? Look back on both these affairs. You aren't altogether a fool. Mayn't this be a third mistake?"
She seized his hand in both her own, and squeezed it with all her strength.
"It's because I love him like that! Not the love that comes of compliments, of attentions and flowers, but that!--But of course you don't understand--you can't."
Mr. Ladd ignored this slight on his more limited knowledge, though his lip curled sardonically under his mustache.
"I am more concerned in how he loves you," he said. "He's acting like a cad, and you know it."
"Papa!"
His voice outrang hers. "Love," he cried, with piercing contempt, "that kind of love is the commonest thing there is. There isn't a drab on the streets who hasn't tasted it to the dregs. God help you when you wake up, and see this man as he is--schemer, scoundrel, blackguard. Do you think I don't know? Do you think I haven't run across hundreds? Do you think I'm going to let an adventurer like that get his hooks into you, and drag you down into his own filthy mire? You're the only thing I have in life; I live for you; there isn't an hour of the day when you're not in my mind. You can't dismiss all this at the nod of a stranger. It carries its obligations--for you, too; the obligation of more than twenty years; not for feeding and clothing you, I don't mean anything so banal--but the deeper one of a love that has kept you warm and happy--that has grown without your knowing it to be a very part of you, as it is all of me."
Had he stopped there the harm might still have been undone. But with a perversity inexplicable at that moment when the tide had turned, and responsive tears were streaming down those girlish cheeks, he had a sudden outburst of rancor that destroyed everything he had gained.
"To think that anybody named Cyril Adair--my God, Cyril Adair, with its suggestion of sticky sweetness, and tinsel, and footlights, and mock heroics--could come between two sane, grown-up people like you and me!--Cyril Adair!" he repeated, and laughed mirthlessly.