"I don't understand this love."
"That's nonsense," vowed Elizabeth; "you know if you love him—and you do love him. It's no use denying it. You daren't look me in the eyes and say you don't."
Nancy evaded the challenge. She did not speak.
"Yes, you do love Ronald," cried her accuser in triumph. "Don't try to hide your face, Nancy dear; I know the symptoms. Now you can't go back."
She spoke as if the matter had been decided and nothing remained except to give Nancy to her lover. But Nancy was not so easily beaten down. She looked quite calmly into the eyes of the friend whom a minute ago she had been afraid to face.
"I love my father," she said, "and I must go back."
Elizabeth gave a gesture of vexation at the stupid way people insisted upon tangling their own happiness. For a moment she was speechless, leaving argument to her less overbearing sister.
"But it isn't as if you were going back to your father," insisted Helen, "not for more than a few weeks. You are going to a husband whom you don't love, whom you have never seen. That is not right, Nancy, not right for you, not right for Ronald, because you do love him and you know it. You are going back just to please an old man, and not to please him for long."
"I am going back to please my father. I want to please him. I don't care how long it is."
"But if he has made a mistake—"