The judge slammed the door on Steve, the unoffending, and, hot with displeasure, made his way toward his sanctum. Diane was there, standing in the center of the room. She had torn off her hat and tossed it on the lounge. She stood there, a slender creature in a dark, clinging dress that made her wild face look white, while her eyes shone in the lamplight with a glow that was like a flame. All the pent-up passion of her soul seemed to have leaped up in them, and her lips were shaking like a child’s who had wept until it can weep no more.
The judge came in and shut the door.
“What does this mean?” he demanded. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
“I’m not—I can’t any more!” was her reply, as she pushed the hair back from her temples and pressed her hands against her eyes. “I’m blind with it now. I—oh, papa, how can I tell you?”
“I don’t know what you want to tell. Where’s your husband?”
Diane’s hands dropped at her sides with a helpless gesture, but she held her head up, meeting her father’s eyes with a flash of spirit.
“I’ve left him.”
The judge was silent. He seemed to be dumb with sheer amazement, for he did not move, but stood, as he had entered, near the door, with his eyes fixed on her.
Diane, forced to take the initiative, tried to control herself. She had been passing through a fiery ordeal, and she felt too bruised and broken in spirit to battle any longer; but she knew that her father was as inexorable as she was. She would have to make it clear to him, to make him see it with her eyes, or he would take sides against her. But she knew that he would not do so if she told him the whole truth. He would feel as she did; there was no other way to feel.
She took a step forward, laid hold of the high back of the chair he had just quitted, and began to speak in a tone that was almost natural: