“Oh, tell me that I can love you!” she wailed. “Tell me that you won’t grow tired of me if I love you!”
He clasped her in his arms and covered her lips with kisses; he soothed her like a frightened child. She was free now to sob out her grief, to tell him what she had felt throughout all these months of misery. “Oh, why didn’t you come to me like this before?” she asked.
“But, Sylvia,” he answered, “how could I know? I saw you letting another man make love to you——”
“But, Frank, that was only a joke!”
“But how could I know that?”
“How could you imagine anything else? That I could prefer Beauregard Dabney to you!”
“That’s easy to say,” he replied. “But there was your family—I knew what they’d prefer, and I saw how they were struggling to keep us apart. And what was I to think—why should you be giving him your time, unless you wanted to let me know——”
“Ah, don’t say that! Don’t say that!” she cried, quickly. “It’s wicked that such a thing should have happened.”
“We must learn to talk things out frankly,” he said. “For one thing you must not let your family come between us again. You must free me from this dreadful fear that they are going to take you from me.”
And suddenly Sylvia blazed up. All the misunderstanding had come from the opposition of her family, and her unwillingness to talk to Frank about it. “I never saw it so clearly before,” she exclaimed. “Frank, I can never make them see things my way. And they’ll always have this dreadful power over me—because I love them so!”