“And you never told me!” he cried. “You never told me!” he repeated, with a strange glance, a glance which strove with terror to discern the mother’s features in the daughter’s face. “You, too—you, too, have begun to deceive me!”
And he threw up his hands in despair.
“Oh, no! no!” Mary cried, infinitely distressed.
“But you have!” he rejoined. “You have kept this from me.”
“Only, believe me, sir,” she cried, eagerly, “until I could find a fitting time.”
“And now you want to go to her!” he answered, unheeding. “She has suborned you! She, who has done the greatest wrong to you, has now done the last wrong to me!”
He began again to pace up and down the room.
“Oh, no! no!” she sobbed.
“It is so!” he answered, darting an angry glance at her. “It is so! But I shall not let you go! Do you hear, girl? I shall not let you go! I have suffered enough,” he continued, with a gesture which called those walls to witness to the humiliations, the sorrows, the loneliness, from which he had sought refuge within them. “I will not—suffer again! You shall not go!”
She was full of love for him, and of pity. She understood even that gesture, and the past wretchedness to which it bore witness. And she yearned to comfort him, and to convince him that nothing that had gone before, nothing that could happen in the future, would set her against him. Had he been seated, she would have knelt and kissed his hand, or cast herself on his breast and his love, and won him to her. But as he walked she could not approach him, she did not know how to soften him. Yet her duty was clear. It lay beside her dying mother. Nevertheless, if he forbade her to go, if he withstood her, how was she to perform it?