“How can I tell?” he muttered at last. “I did not see him.”
She pushed him away from her, and sprang to her feet. “Is my father a good man?”
“A good man,” he repeated, restlessly. “What is a good man?”
“You know what I mean,” she said, harshly. “Is he like you?”
“He is certainly not like me,” he replied, with a grim and feeble attempt at pleasantry.
She repulsed his sympathetic hand, and flung herself across the room.
“Nina,” he called after her, in a voice vibrating with compassion, “come back.”
She turned a deaf ear to him, and kneeling on a seat by the window stared out into the night. She saw nothing. The outside world was as black and confused as her own thoughts. She remained mute, unthinking almost, until a slight and reminiscent sound stirred even her sluggish mind.
She remembered the soft and not unpleasing tones of that voice, and she turned around. The door had opened softly and closed again; and, standing with his back against it, was the man with the quiet, sneering face. He was smiling stealthily at her husband,—her husband who had forgotten her, and who stood with a white, still anger on his brow, a contemptuous hatred in his eyes. These two men were enemies. Nina saw it in the careless malice of the one, and the smothered anger of the other; and, crawling painfully across the room, she stood between them.
The newcomer straightened himself and looked over her shoulder. “You are outwitted, Fordyce, otherwise you never would have afforded me the sight of my daughter. Thank Heaven I had the thought of sending you the false report of my death.”