She nodded; she could not speak. Her father groaned aloud.
“My child—my poor child!”
She looked up at him, saw the grief and anger and sympathy in his face, and her lip quivered pitifully. She tried to speak again, but words utterly failed her, and she flung herself into his arms, weeping dreadfully. The judge clasped her and held her close, stroking her brown hair, tears scalding his own eyes. What had he done! Married his child, his daughter, the pride of his heart, to a coward?
“The rascal!” he said below his breath. “The craven rascal!”
She clung to him sobbing.
“I loved him! Oh, papa, I loved him! It’s—it’s broken my heart!”
He tried to quiet her, but his indignation kept breaking out in angry mutterings and threats against Faunce. Apparently she did not hear them. She was satisfied to feel his arms around her, to be sure that she was safe in that harbor. She only turned her head a little as she nestled closer, clinging to him with hands that still shook.
“I was afraid you’d be angry with me, that you’d want me to—to go back, because he’s—he’s my husband!”
“Go back!” The judge’s pent-up wrath broke out with some of his old thunderous bass. “Go back to that coward? If you did, Di, I’d—I’d go after you and pry you out of his house with a writ of habeas corpus. I’d sooner see you dead than the wife of a coward. I’ll free you, if it takes my last cent to do it!”
She shivered. The assurance was what she wanted. She had craved it for hours; she had prayed for it ever since she ran away from the little mountain house in the dark and stormy night, and braved a midnight journey to come to her father; yet it did not comfort her now. She shook from head to foot, and a feeling of sheer loneliness and desolation—a feeling that might have come to Hagar when she was driven out into the desert—came to her.