“Have you nothing more to say to me than that?” he asked.
“Nothing more,” I answered.
He changed again. After having looked unaccountably angry, he now looked unaccountably relieved.
“I will soon satisfy you,” he said, “that I have a good reason for preserving a worthless letter. Miss Chance, my dear, is not a woman to be trusted. If she saw her advantage in making a bad use of my reply, I am afraid she would not hesitate to do it. Even if she is no longer living, I don’t know into what vile hands my letter may not have fallen, or how it might be falsified for some wicked purpose. Do you see now how a correspondence may become accidentally important, though it is of no value in itself?”
I could say “Yes” to this with a safe conscience.
But there were some perplexities still left in my mind. It seemed strange that Miss Chance should (apparently) have submitted to the severity of my father’s reply. “I should have thought,” I said to him, “that she would have sent you another impudent letter—or perhaps have insisted on seeing you, and using her tongue instead of her pen.”
“She could do neither the one nor the other, Helena. Miss Chance will never find out my address again; I have taken good care of that.”
He spoke in a loud voice, with a flushed face—as if it was quite a triumph to have prevented this woman from discovering his address. What reason could he have for being so anxious to keep her away from him? Could I venture to conclude that there was a mystery in the life of a man so blameless, so truly pious? It shocked one even to think of it.
There was a silence between us, to which the housemaid offered a welcome interruption. Dinner was ready.
He kissed me before we left the room. “One word more, Helena,” he said, “and I have done. Let there be no more talk between us about Elizabeth Chance.”