“You will perhaps wish to take off your pack,” he said, with bare civility.
Doane disposed of this remark with a jerk of his head. “I have very little time to waste on you,” he said bruskly. “What are you doing in T'ainan? Why did you come here?”
There was a long silence.
“Very well, if you won't answer.”... Doane's voice rasped.
Brachey raised his hand. “I was considering your question,” he broke in coldly. “While it is not the whole truth, it will probably save time to say that I came to see your daughter.”
He would have liked to express in his voice some thing of the desperate tenderness that he felt. The experiences of the preceding evening and of the afternoon just past—the glimpses he had had into the heart of a girl, his little storms of anger against Mrs. Boatwright and all her kind, followed in each instance by other little storms of anger against himself—had finally swept him from the last rational mooring place out into the bottomless, boundless sea of emotion. He had found himself, already to-night, a storm-tossed soul without compass or bearings or rudder. He burned to see Betty again. It had taken all that was left of his will to keep from charging out once more across the city, out through the wall, to the mission compound. He was shaken, humbled, frightened. To such a nature as Brachey's—stubbornly aloof from human contacts, sensitively self-sufficient—this was really a terrible experience. It was the worst storm of his life. He felt—had felt at times during the evening, as he tried to brace himself for this scene that he knew had to come within the twenty-four hours—something near tenderness for the man who was Betty's father. There were even moments when he looked forward to the meeting with the hope that through the father's feelings he might be helped in finding his lost self.
He had tried, sitting among the shadows, to build up a picture of the man. Several of these he had constructed, to meet each of which he felt he could hold himself in a mental attitude of frankness and even sympathy. But each of these pictures was but an elaboration of familiar missionary types. All were what he considered—or once had considered—weak, or over-earnest to the borders of fanaticism, or cautious little men, or narrow formalists... men like Boatwright And without realizing, it, too, he had counted on either real or counterfeited Christian forbearance. The only thing he had feared might come up to disturb him was intolerance, like that of Boatwright's wife.