Mr. Van Ness did not at once reply. He scanned her curiously, as he might a tool about whose temper he was not certain, but which it was necessary for him to use.
"Your father has told you my reason for wishing to speak to you to-day?" he said abruptly.
Jane's head and very throat were scarlet: "Yes. But we will not talk at all of that matter, Mr. Van Ness," stammering with haste. "It is impossible, unnatural. You are more experienced than I: you must see that it is impossible more clearly than I do."
"In hoping," he resumed, after calmly dropping his light eyelashes while she spoke, politely attentive, "in anxiously striving, I may say, to gain you as my wife, I did not intend to give up the cause of the orphan and the fatherless."
"Oh you ought not to give it up! It would be really criminal! After you have gone so far! And I should be no help to you at all," she added breathlessly.
"But," with his light confusing gaze full on her, "you know, to speak plain English, that your father on his deathbed desires that you shall marry me?"
The blood came and rushed back from Jane's face, leaving it colorless.
"Why will you not grant this last wish?"
Why? There was no reason why she should not. She was dear to nobody else in the world than this old man—she was of use to nobody else. To nobody. She looked for some time directly into the shallow eyes facing her with aggressive complaisance. "I cannot do it," she said at last. She seemed to have grown stolid from head to foot.
"Why? What is this bar between us?" coming a step closer.