The sweet young face looked troubled for a moment, and then slowly--very slowly and sadly--Elin shook her head.
He felt like a man who had been sentenced to death, but while his face clouded and fell, the girl's rose and became beautifully calm.
"I don't see how that could make any difference," she said. "I couldn't feel as if you were my father unless I had known you as long as I could remember, and longer even than that. What I call a father is one who has nursed you on his knee when you were a little thing, and kissed you and coaxed you when you were sick, and thought of you and cared for you always, not one who has been away from you all your life, who has never cared for you at all, and whom you wouldn't know if you met him in the road."
"But don't you feel, dear, that there is something in the relation of a child to her father, however he may have neglected her--something intimate and sacred--something she can never know in her relation to anybody else, however much he may have done for her--don't you feel that, Elin?"
Again the girl thought for a moment, and again she shook her head.
"But if I were to say to you, 'My child, my dear, dear child, I may have done nothing for you, but still I am your father, and you are the only one who is left to me now, and I want you to come to me and be my daughter, and we shall never be parted again'--if I were to say that to you, would you still hold to your uncle?"
The tremulous fervor with which he spoke these imploring words brought tears to the girl's eyes, but her heart stood firm and strong.
"Yes," she said, "I couldn't help it, because Uncle Magnus has been my real father after all."
It was all over. His last hold of the girl was lost. Again he felt as if the world had gone away from him, as if the dark column of hope which had shown its bright face for a moment had turned again, and now all was hopeless darkness.
He had thought Nature would speak to the girl, but it had not spoken. Nature was a great, inexorable instrument in the hand of God, and God's hand was on him. As he had done, so he was being done by--as he had taken the love of Thora from Magnus, so Magnus, after many years, had taken the love of Elin from him. It was right, it was inevitable, and he must bow his head in speechless submission before the justice and the vengeance of God!