"I want none of your preaching," and my voice was coarse with anger; "you are a willful and disobedient child and you may as well learn first as last who is the master of this house. Do you hear?"
"Yes, I hear,—and my heart is broken. You want me to go away and not to see me any more. And I don't know where to go."
She was kneeling now and the tears were dropping hot upon my hand, which she had taken in both of hers. "Oh, father, when birdlings leave the nest, surely God wants them to go, because He gives them wings. Father, dear, oh, do not push me out in this cruel way. I want to keep you and Angus both—and mother. Am I really wrong?
"Father, you are a preacher of the Everlasting Gospel, and doesn't that say we were all born wrong and need to be born again? You said only last Sunday that if we're once on the Rock, God forgets all about the pit and the miry clay. And you said God makes the past new—all new, and that all the redeemed ones are just the same in His sight—all good, and with the past away behind them. I thought it was beautiful, because I thought about Angus—and it seemed just like the Saviour's way."
My heart was wrung with a great desire to take the bended form unto myself. I half moved forward to kiss the lips of this kneeling priestess unto love. But as I did so the memory of other lips that had been pressed to them rolled in upon me and swept away the better impulse. I faltered into compromise.
"Margaret, you are still my daughter and I am touched by what you say. Let us find common ground. Promise me that you will suspend judgment in this matter for a year, your promise meantime to be revoked and at the end of that time, we will take it up afresh. This will give time for sober judgment."
But her blanched face turned to mine, and the white lips spoke again. "Oh, spare me, father, for I cannot—you know I cannot—oh, father, pity me!"
My soul flamed with ungovernable anger. I did pity her and this it was that stirred my cruelty. For my soul relapsed to barbarous coarseness and I said: "Then choose between us—you can have your ——," and I called him an awful word, the foulest of all words, whose very sound speaks the shame it means to tell, the curse of humanity hissed in its nauseous syllables.
And more—but how can I write it down! I did not strike her—but I thrust her from me; I laid my coward hand upon her shoulder—not in violence nor heavily, but eternal menace was in it. For I pushed her from me, crying brutally: "Quote me another Scripture. Have you not chosen the better part? There is the door which his shadow first accursed—you see the door?" and I hurled the poisoned word at her again.
She looked at me but once—as one, suddenly awakening, looks at her assassin. Then she went out, a lover as white as snow.