“Certainly, my love—your old playfellow—why not? What’s the matter? God bless my soul, what is the girl crying about? One would think Frank was transported for life. You goose! You know, as well as I do, he is going to China to make his fortune.”
“He doesn’t want to make his fortune—he might do much better.”
“The deuce he might! How, I should like to know?”
“I’m afraid to tell you. I’m afraid you’ll laugh at me. Will you promise not to laugh at me?”
“Anything to please you, my dear. Yes: I promise. Now, then, out with it! How might Frank do better?”
“He might marry Me.”
If the summer scene which then spread before Mr. Vanstone’s eyes had suddenly changed to a dreary winter view—if the trees had lost all their leaves, and the green fields had turned white with snow in an instant—his face could hardly have expressed greater amazement than it displayed when his daughter’s faltering voice spoke those four last words. He tried to look at her—but she steadily refused him the opportunity: she kept her face hidden over his shoulder. Was she in earnest? His cheek, still wet with her tears, answered for her. There was a long pause of silence; she waited—with unaccustomed patience, she waited for him to speak. He roused himself, and spoke these words only: “You surprise me, Magdalen; you surprise me more than I can say.”
At the altered tone of his voice—altered to a quiet, fatherly seriousness—Magdalen’s arms clung round him closer than before.
“Have I disappointed you, papa?” she asked, faintly. “Don’t say I have disappointed you! Who am I to tell my secret to, if not to you? Don’t let him go—don’t! don’t! You will break his heart. He is afraid to tell his father; he is even afraid you might be angry with him. There is nobody to speak for us, except—except me. Oh, don’t let him go! Don’t for his sake—” she whispered the next words in a kiss—“Don’t for Mine!”
Her father’s kind face saddened; he sighed, and patted her fair head tenderly. “Hush, my love,” he said, almost in a whisper; “hush!” She little knew what a revelation every word, every action that escaped her, now opened before him. She had made him her grown-up playfellow, from her childhood to that day. She had romped with him in her frocks, she had gone on romping with him in her gowns. He had never been long enough separated from her to have the external changes in his daughter forced on his attention. His artless, fatherly experience of her had taught him that she was a taller child in later years—and had taught him little more. And now, in one breathless instant, the conviction that she was a woman rushed over his mind. He felt it in the trouble of her bosom pressed against his; in the nervous thrill of her arms clasped around his neck. The Magdalen of his innocent experience, a woman—with the master-passion of her sex in possession of her heart already!