Mr. Dundas started perceptibly. "Oh," he answered after a moment's hesitation, with a forced and sickly kind of smile, "a silly girl's wrong-headedness does not reach quite so far as that. She has done wrong, miserably wrong, but between withdrawing herself from her father's house and committing such a crime as murder there is rather a wide difference. All the same, I am disgraced by her folly," angrily, "and I will not let any one—not even you, Alick—know where she is."
"That is cruel to those who love her," pleaded Alick, his eyes filling with tears.
"If cruel it is necessary," said Mr. Dundas.
"But she must need friends about her now more than she ever did," urged Alick. "Tell me at least where to find her, that I may do what I can to console her."
Mr. Dundas shook his head. "No," he said sternly, "She is dead to me, and shall be dead to my friends. She is blotted out from my love, and I will blot her out from my memory; and no one's persuasions can bring back what is effaced. Now, my dear boy, let us understand one another. I have surprised your secret: you love my daughter, and had she been worthy of you I would have given her to you more willingly than to any one I know. But she herself has fixed the gulf between us, which I will not pass nor help any one else to pass. Learn to look on her as dead, for she is dead to me, to you, to the world."
"Never to me," cried Alick. "While she lives she must be always to me what she has been from the first day I saw her. Whatever she has done, I shall always love her as much as I do now."
"You are faithful," replied Sebastian, "but trust me, boy, no woman that ever lived was worth so much fidelity. I will protect you against your own wish, and be your friend in spite of yourself. You shall not know where she is, and you shall not throw yourself away on her. As she has elected to be effaced, she shall be effaced—blotted out for ever."
"Then I will consecrate my life to finding her," cried Alick warmly.
Mr. Dundas shrugged his shoulders. "Who can persuade a willful man against his folly?" he said coldly. "You are following a marsh-light, my boy, and if you do find it you will only be landed in a bog."
"If I find her I shall have found my reward," Alick answered with boyish fervor. "It will be happiness enough for me if I can bring back one smile to her face or lighten one hour of its sorrow."