“You’ve seen Overton?”
“Ye-es; just now. I met him on the way home,” she stammered.
A look of relief softened the judge’s face. He rose from his chair and, crossing the room, took his daughter in his arms.
“My child, you’re half sick! You’ve worried too much. Don’t talk in this way again. You know you long to be free.”
His softened tone disarmed her again. She clung to him, trembling, tears in her eyes.
“Oh, I do—I do!” she sobbed. “I long to be my old self again!”
The judge gathered her up in his arms, as he had often gathered her up as a child, and carried her up-stairs to her room. He put her on the lounge and covered her up; then he went down, and sent the old maid servant up with a cup of hot tea. It was the only thing he could think of that seemed to fill the peculiar demands of a case like this—a case which, to his mind, was nothing but hysteria. Then he set himself to framing the reply to Faunce that Diane was to sign.
He had made up his mind to settle her affairs for her. He was convinced now that she loved Overton. Sternly as he might have viewed such a case where others were involved, he could see only one side of it for his own daughter—her right, the inalienable right of youth and love, to happiness. He did not permit the finer and more ethical questions to disturb his fixed determination to wrest her from the craven who had been capable of a crime as near to murder as anything short of actual killing could be. Indeed, to his own stalwart mind, it was even worse than murder.
Meanwhile Diane, up-stairs in her own room, drank the hot tea, and permitted the maid to help her with some dry clothing; but she was still shaking like a person who had been suddenly smitten with ague. All the while she seemed to see, through a mist shot with golden rain-drops, the face of Overton, transfigured with his love for her. She wrung her hands together and hid her face in them, oblivious of the pitying eyes of the old servant who had come to take away the tea-things.
She was still sitting there, with her head in her hands, when she heard her father leave the library and go out, and knew herself to be alone in the house. She breathed more freely when she was not in immediate danger of being rushed into some new and terrible decision—a decision that might make her as wretched as that other one which had led to her marriage. She rose weakly from the lounge and went down-stairs.