"Why not?"
"Oh," tremulously, "it was all right when I had mother, because she was so sick that I was too busy to realize how deadly lonely it was here. I knew she needed the sea air, and she could get it better in the top of this old house than anywhere else. But now that she's gone—I can't stand it. I'm young, and Miss Matthews is away all day teaching—and when she comes home at night we have nothing in common, and there's the money left from the insurance—and so—I'm going away."
He looked at her, with her red-gold hair in high relief against the worn leather of the chair in which she sat, at the flower-like face, the slender figure, the tiny feet in childish strapped slippers.
"You aren't fit to fight the world," he said; "you aren't fit."
"Perhaps it won't be such a fight," she said. "I could get something to do in the city, and——"
He shook his head. "You don't know—you can't know——" Then he broke off to ask, "What would you do with your furniture?"
"Miss Matthews would be glad to take the rooms just as they are. She was delighted when you asked her to stay with me after mother died. She loves our old things, the mahogany and the banjo clock, and the embroidered peacocks, and the Venetian heirlooms that belonged to Dad's family. But I hate them."
"Hate them—why?"
"Because, oh, you know, because Dad treated mother so dreadfully. He broke her heart."
His practiced eye saw that she was speaking tensely.