He looked at her, his head slightly bowed, his lower lip thrust out. “Listen,” he said, with decision. “What you propose—to go to her, I mean—is impossible. Impossible, you understand. There must be an end of any thought of it!” His tone was cold, but not unkind. “The thing must not be mentioned again, if you please,” he added.
She was silent a while. Then, “Why, sir?” she asked. She spoke tremulously, and with an effort. But he had not expected her to speak at all.
Yet he merely continued, as he stood on the hearth rug, to look at her askance. “That is for me,” he said, “to decide.”
“But——”
“But I will tell you,” he said, stiffly. “Because she has already ruined part of your life!”
“I forgive her, from my heart!” Mary cried.
“And ruined, also,” he continued, putting the interruption aside, “a great part of mine. At your age I do not think fit to tell you—all. It is enough, that she has robbed me of you, and deceived me. Deceived me,” he repeated, more bitterly, “through long years when you, my daughter, might have been my comfort and—” he ended, almost inaudibly, “my joy.”
He turned his back on her with the word and began to walk the room, his chin sunk on his breast, his hands clasped. It was clear to Mary, watching him with loving, pitying eyes, that his thoughts were with the unhappy past, with the short fever, the ignoble contentions of his married life, or with the lonely, soured years which had followed. She felt that he was laying to his wife’s charge the wreck of his life, and the slow dry-rot which had sapped hope, and strength, and development.
Mary waited until his step trod the carpet less hurriedly. Then, as he paused to turn, she stepped forward.
“Yet, sir—forgive her!” she cried. And there were warm tears in her voice.