Berenice, still kneeling, put up her small hands as if to ward off a blow.
“Ah, cruel, cruel!” she moaned. Then bitterly: “How could you think your son so low? Did he show a mercenary spirit when he married poor little Berry Vining? Oh, may I tell you all about it? Will you listen fairly?”
“Yes, I will listen, but stop crying first and get up and sit in this chair close by, while you tell me how it happened.”
Berenice, looking adorably pretty and pitiful, obeyed him, and after drying her wet eyes again, said patiently:
“It was this way, sir: Just as I tell you, Charley loved all of you dearly and grieved over the separation, not for your money’s worth, but for true love’s sake. So that day when he read you were in England, he said he would go and find you and beg your forgiveness. But I—I—was timid and afraid of you, so I stayed here. I refused to go. When he was gone I was lonely, and the maid told me of the desperate case of the sick man up here, with no doctor or nurse, so I thought it must be you and I came to you, asking no one’s leave because I knew when Charley should come back he would feel I had only done my duty coming here to succor his dear father. And I was right, for so he said in his letters afterward. Oh, sir, we are not after your money, we only want your pardon—for him, if not for me, poor Charley! Because he loves you so! As for me, I have done very little, really, for there was no risk nursing you since I had already had the disease years ago. I—I—might never have told you who I was, or claimed any favor, only that you bade me to, and then my heart leaped at the thought of my husband. Oh, cannot you understand?” She broke down and hid her lovely face in her dimpled hands.
Her dazed father-in-law sat watching her, noting her wonderful grace and charm, recalling what his son had said to him the day of their bitter quarrel.
In his weakness and loneliness, the old love, smothered under anger, seemed to surge upward again and flood his whole being with tenderness for his son. But he called pride to his aid, lest she should see too quickly, this lovely suppliant, how the ice was melting around his heart.
“Tell me,” he said, and his voice sounded stern and harsh in her ears, “tell me all about yourself and Charley—how you first met, how love grew between you until he forgot his troth to Rosalind. Begin at the beginning; leave nothing unsaid.”
Berenice obeyed, nothing loath, for it pleased her to recall everything connected with Charley, and she left nothing untold from the hour of their first meeting until now.
Senator Bonair, resting easily, with half-closed eyes, did not miss a word of her story, nor an expression of her radiant face that glowed with happy blushes as she told her tale of love.