“I’m sorry you feel toward him as you do, father. I believe that we might trust him. I look upon him as a friend.”
Ezra Dameron was weak and the talk was wearying him. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the chair, moving it from side to side restlessly.
He was silent for a moment; then he brought his eyes to bear on her.
“Zee,” he began haltingly,—“Zee, I’m sorry I spoke of him as I did. I was quite out of my senses. He is a fine, manly fellow.”
“Don’t trouble about anything, father,” she said, and went to her room for her wraps.
Ezra Dameron was beaten and he was not heroic in defeat. He was stunned by the failure of his gambling operations. He had lived so entirely in dreams for a year that it was difficult for him to realize the broad daylight of a workaday world. Echoes of the harsh things that had passed between him and the child of his own blood but a few hours before still haunted him. She had summoned the apparition of her dead mother and had called him a liar; and he had insulted her in the harshest terms he knew; but he was now leaning upon her helplessly. He did not know, and he could not understand, the motives that were prompting her. He had thrown away her money, and she did not arraign him for it; she was even devising means of covering up his ill-doings; and the fact that one could overlook and pardon the loss of a fortune was utterly beyond his comprehension.
When she came down, her father was still sitting as she had left him, with a look of unutterable dejection on his face.
“You won’t go out to-day,—of course!”
“What? No! no! My business is over. If they come for me they will find me here,—here—at home,” he said wearily.
His smile, the smile that had been hard to bear, was gone.