“Just think for a moment,” she said, “he has given up everything to join the army. Any day, now, he may go—out there. He loves me, Daddy—and I love him.”
“He is not worthy of you—” Bransby was commanding himself—at what cost only he knew—and Horace Latham might partly have guessed.
After a pause—painful to him—she was too indignant to suffer much now—at last she spoke—sternly. “Why do you say that?”
“Don’t press the question,” he pleaded, “you know how much I care for you—how dear you are to me. Surely you must know that I would not come between you and your happiness if I hadn’t a good reason.”
“But I must know that reason.”
“You won’t give him up—for me?”
Pity for his evident distress welled over her, and she answered him tenderly: “I can’t, dear.”
She waited. He waited too. He could count his heart thump, and almost she might have counted it too.
At last he nerved himself desperately, went to his desk and pulled the ledger from the drawer. He put it down ready to his hand, if he had to show it to her at last; then turned and laid his hands on her shoulders.
When he could command himself—it was not at once—he said, speaking more gently than in all his long, gentle loving of her he had ever spoken to her before, “Helen, Hugh is a thief.”