“Yes, ’Steban,” she said, sweetly.
He pushed the clothes aside brusquely, and, stalking across the room, gazed silently out the window. After a long time he looked over his shoulder. “And after we come back—what do you wish to do?”
“That I leave to you,” she responded, with an entirely new and bewitching humility.
A swift beatific smile hovered about his lips; and, looking as if he could scarcely believe his senses, he approached her, but swung on his heel when he saw the shy and startled expression that passed like a shadow over her face.
“’Steban,” she said, nervously, “I can’t get those people out of my head. I mean the Danvers. They are my real parents. I love them more and more. It is not wrong?”
“Wrong, no,—like them as much as you wish.”
“I cannot love that man,” she said, shudderingly. “He is my father,—I ought to, yet I cannot.”
“You need not like him. He is not worthy of it. I have had a longer acquaintance with him than you have. He never was anything much, and he is deteriorating all the time.”
“What does he do for a living?” asked Nina, wistfully. “I thought he looked poor.”
“He deserves to be poor.”