“You’re ill, that’s what ails you!” her father exclaimed sharply. “I was a fool not to see it, you’re too hysterical to sign this paper to-day, I”—he stamped over to the telephone—“I’ll call up Gerry. I ought to have done it before——”
She stopped him. “Papa!”
He swung around at the sound of her voice, and, for an instant, they looked at each other. She was trembling, but a little color came back into her face.
“I’m not ill,” she said slowly, with an effort, “and I’m not mad now. I’m sorry, papa, I can’t sign it because——” she stopped, her eyes fell, the color rose softly from chin to brow, her whole face seemed transformed and softened and strangely beautiful—“because it would be wrong for me to sign it.”
His eyes sparkled with anger. “Wrong for you to sign it? Do you mean to tell me that I—your father—would ask you to do anything wrong?”
“No, no! You don’t understand—I—I can’t tell you, papa, I can’t tell any one—just what I feel. It’s something a woman can’t tell—I mean she can’t make any one else understand the change that comes into her heart and her soul when she’s been tried—as I’ve been tried!”
“Pshaw! Any fool could understand it—you’re hysterical!”
Diane gave him a strange look, a look that was not only appealing, it was mystical and remote, it seemed to the angry old man that his daughter’s soul was withdrawing itself into some shadowy region, as obscure to his robust mind as the mists and the snows that had enveloped the fatal delinquency of her husband. But the suspicion that had shot through his mind at the door, came back now with sudden and convincing force.
“That fellow’s been writing to you!” he exclaimed, “he’s been trying to make you come back!”
Diane, full of the fresh consciousness of Arthur’s letter, averted her eyes.