“No,” he said instantly, “that is not a reason at all, Zee. You are doing for your father all that you could be asked to do,—and I should not ask you to do less.”
“I must do all I can,” she said. “There must be no question of loyalty. And now,”—she turned to him smiling,—“it’s very disagreeable outside; let us be cheerful indoors.”
“Zee,” he began gravely, “I’m not so easily dismissed as that. There’s something that I want to say, that I shouldn’t dare say to you, if I did not love you. I knew months ago that you were showing a cheerful face to the world while you suffered.”
“Please, oh, please!” and she lifted her hands to her face. “It is not kind! You must not!”
“You made light of things that you knew were good; you said things often that you did not mean; but you were brave and strong and fine. I understood it, Zee. But now that is all out of the way. There is no use in thinking about it any more.”
“No; but you must know that I talked to you as I did because,—oh, because I hated goodness! I tried to hate it! It was because—father—but I mustn’t—speak of it.”
“I understand all about that, Zee.”
“But I am very old,”—she went on pitifully; “I am very old, and my girlhood—it all went away from me last year—and every day I had to act a part, and I did so many foolish things,—you must have thought—”
“That I loved you, Zee,” he declared, refusing to meet her on the ground she sought.
“The sweetest thing in the world,” she said, “must be—not to know—of evil; not to know!” and there was the pent-up heartache of a year in the sigh that broke from her.