“Miss Kenton,” said the young man, abruptly, “will you let me tell you how much I admire and revere your father?”
Tears came into her eyes and her throat swelled. “But you don’t know,” she begun; and then she stopped.
“I have been wanting to submit something to his judgment; but I’ve been afraid. I might seem to be fishing for his favor.”
“Poppa wouldn’t think anything that was unjust,” said Ellen, gravely.
“Ah,” Breckon laughed, “I suspect that I should rather have him unjust. I wish you’d tell me what he would think.”
“But I don’t know what it is,” she protested, with a reflected smile.
“I was in hopes Miss Rasmith might have told you. Well, it is simply this, and you will see that I’m not quite the universal favorite she’s been making you fancy me. There is a rift in my lute, a schism in my little society, which is so little that I could not have supposed there was enough of it to break in two. There are some who think their lecturer—for that’s what I amount to—ought to be an older, if not a graver man. They are in the minority, but they’re in the right, I’m afraid; and that’s why I happen to be here telling you all this. It’s a question of whether I ought to go back to New York or stay in London, where there’s been a faint call for me.” He saw the girl listening devoutly, with that flattered look which a serious girl cannot keep out of her face when a man confides a serious matter to her. “I might safely promise to be older, but could I keep my word if I promised to be graver? That’s the point. If I were a Calvinist I might hold fast by faith, and fight it out with that; or if I were a Catholic I could cast myself upon the strength of the Church, and triumph in spite of temperament. Then it wouldn’t matter whether I was grave or gay; it might be even better if I were gay. But,” he went on, in terms which, doubtless, were not then for the first time formulated in his mind, “being merely the leader of a sort of forlorn hope in the Divine Goodness, perhaps I have no right to be so cheerful.”
The note of a sad irony in his words appealed to such indignation for him in Ellen as she never felt for herself. But she only said, “I don’t believe Poppa could take that in the wrong way if you told him.”
Breckon stared. “Yes your father! What would he say?”
“I can’t tell you. But I’m sure he would know what you meant.”