As she spoke she looked up, encountered the amazement and fury and repudiation in his eyes, and swayed under it—but only for a moment. She steadied herself, and, turning back again with a gesture of finality, laid the pen down on the table.
XXXIII
Five minutes later the judge had closed the door behind the young notary, and stood alone in the hall. He had shut the door sharply, with almost a bang, but now he stood—with his hand still on the knob—thinking. His first fury against his daughter was scarcely subsiding, it had gained force in those moments of mortification—when he had to dismiss the young man whom he had brought to witness her signature—and now it rose in a hot wave of anger against her and against Faunce. He suspected that Faunce had written to her, he was trying to drag the poor girl back against her will. And she—Diane Herford, his own daughter—had not the force of character to resist that craven!
The judge turned with a black brow and tramped back to the library door.
“Diane,” he said in a voice of thunder, “what do you mean by this?”
She was still standing beside the table, in fact she was clinging to the edge of it, and her face was deathly pale. She did not move, she did not even raise her eyes, and her father, still enraged, became alarmed.
“Did you hear me?” he shouted. “What is it, Diane, are you ill? Are you mad?”
At that she turned her head, and slowly and reluctantly lifted her eyes to his.
“I think I’ve been mad, father,” she replied in a low voice, “mad and wicked.”
The judge came into the room, he moved over to get a nearer look at her, peering across the table—where the paper still lay, with the pen flung across the face of it, a mute witness of her indecision, or her change of heart. Diane did not meet his eyes this time, she averted her face and her lips trembled.