“Don't tell him from me,” said her father. “And don't keep making promises and breaking them. I'll help the man in with your things.”
He went out, and came in again with one end of a trunk, as if he had been giving the man a hand with it into the house at home, and she suffered him as passively as she had suffered him to do her such services all her life. Then he took her hand laxly in his, and stooped down for another chary kiss. “Good by, Marcia.”
“Why, father! Are you going to leave me?” she faltered.
He smiled in melancholy irony at the bewilderment, the childish forgetfulness of all the circumstances, which her words expressed. “Oh, no! I'm going to take you with me.”
His sarcasm restored her to a sense of what she had said, and she ruefully laughed at herself through her tears. “What am I talking about? Give my love to mother. When will you come again?” she asked, clinging about him almost in the old playful way.
“When you want me,” said the Squire, freeing himself.
“I'll write!” she cried after him, as he went down the steps; and if there had been, at any moment, a consciousness of her cruelty to him in her heart, she lost it, when he drove away, in her anxious waiting for Bartley's return. It seemed to her that, though her father had refused to see him, his visit was of happy augury for future kindness between them, and she was proudly eager to tell Bartley what good advice her father had given her. But the sight of her husband suddenly turned these thoughts to fear. She trembled, and all that she could say was, “I know father will be all right, Bartley.”
“How?” he retorted, savagely. “By the way he abused me to you? Where is he?”
“He's gone,—gone back.”
“I don't care where he's gone, so he's gone. Did he come to take you home with him? Why didn't you go?—Oh, Marcia!” The brutal words had hardly escaped him when he ran to her as if he would arrest them before their sense should pierce her heart.