“I’m not afraid but that you will do what is right. You are the son of your father. I don’t believe you take things as hard as he did. Don’t do it. And don’t remember what I have told you to-night. It’s a queer story. And it hasn’t any moral at all. Your father missed something out of his life,—the fine ardor of his younger manhood, maybe. But he had your mother and he had you. It wasn’t he that was punished.”
He was silent a moment, and then blurted out:
“What does Zelda think of Pollock?”
“I don’t know!” Morris rose and walked the length of the room.
“What does she think of you, then?” demanded Merriam, looking directly at Morris.
“I think she hates me,” said Morris. He turned and left the house abruptly, leaving the old man alone with his memories.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE FIRST OF OCTOBER
The old Dameron house had known much of the pain and joy of life. Merriams had been born and had died there; but the tumult of spirit that shook it on the last night of September was of a new and disquieting order.
Zelda closed the door and sat down at her desk by the window. She went over the interview with her father sentence by sentence, with surprise that she could remember so well; and a kind of terror possessed her, now that she saw the hideousness of it all. One sentence rang in her head over and over again, like a tolling bell; and she could see at every repetition the angry light that had flashed in her father’s eyes:
“I wish you would not lie to me, Ezra Dameron!”