"Oh, father, I will tell you all I can—but I cannot tell you all."
I started in my chair, for the child note was absent from her words, and the passion of womanhood was in its stead. Awesome to a father's heart is that moment wherein a daughter's voice unconsciously asserts the suffrage of her soul.
"Go on, my daughter—tell me what you may," I said, for I knew now that the realm was one wherein parental authority was of no avail.
Only silence followed; her lips spoke no word, but the heaving bosom had a rhetoric all its own and told me that a new life, begotten not of mine, was throbbing there. An alien life it seemed to me, a soul's expansion beyond the province of my own, an infinitude which denied the sway of even a father's love. At length she spoke:
"Oh, father, I will tell you all—that is, all I can. But I am so lonely. You cannot follow me, father. I have gone away in—with another—in where you cannot go."
"What mean you, Margaret? In where? Where can I not come?" I asked, perplexed.
"Father, let me tell you. I am speaking in a figure, I know—but it is the only way—and you will understand. Love is a far country, and prodigals take their journey there—but they seek it two by two. Oh, father, another one and I went off together to that far, far land and those who go leave father and mother far behind. But there is no hunger and no famine there."
Rich the endowment love bestows! While we had all thought Margaret anything but dull, yet this new speech of metaphor and music fell upon my ears as a great surprise. That live coal from off God's altar had touched her lips when first another's burning lips of love anointed them with flame. When this new sun arises, the humblest of God's meadow creatures know that the soul has wings and spread them in that holy light.
Closer to my breast I pressed the heart whose tumult, as it struggled with its muffled witnesses, started the same passionate riot in my own.
"There are many voices in your heart, daughter mine; let them speak every one and tell me all their story. Where is it that your father cannot come?"