“Of course I did. Of course, of course. What else can I ever say?”
She leaned her white cheek on the high oak mantel, and a little deep sob came from her heart.
“Would you have liked to say ‘Yes,’ Pearl?” her father asked very softly, going to put his arm round her waist, and then afraid to do it.
“Oh no! oh no! At least, not yet, though I respect him very highly. But I told him that I never could, and never could tell him the reason. And oh, I was so sorry for him—he looked so hurt and disappointed.”
“You shall tell him the reason very soon, or rather the newspapers shall.”
“Father, donʼt say that; dear father, you are bound for our sake. I donʼt care for him one atom, father, compared with—compared with you, I mean. Only I thought I must tell you, because—oh, you know what I mean. And even if I did like him, what would it matter about me? Oh, father, I often think that I have been too hard upon you, and all of it through me, and my vile concealment!”
“My daughter, I am not worthy of you. Would God that you could forgive me!”
“I have done it long ago, father. Do you think a child of yours could help it, after all your sorrow?”
“My child, look kindly at me; try to look as if you loved me.”
She turned to him with such a look as a man only gets once in his life, and then she fell upon his neck, and forgot the world and all it held, except her own dear father. Wrong he might have done, wrong (no doubt) he had done; but who was she, his little child, to remember it against him? She lay for a moment in his arms, overcome with passion, leaning back, as she had done there, when a weanling infant. For him it was the grandest moment of his passionate life—a fatherʼs powerful love, ennobled by the presence of his God. Such a moment teaches us the grandeur of our race, the traces of a higher world stamped on us indelibly. Then we feel, and try to own, that in spite of satire, cynicism, and the exquisite refinements of the purest selfishness, there is, in even the sharpest and the shallowest of us, something kind and solid, some abiding element of the all–pervading goodness.