“And has he proposed to you?”
“He has,” she faltered, blushing more deeply.
He drew a long breath, rose slowly, and pulling aside the white blind, looked out as if in search of something. In truth, he was hesitating whether he should speak to her at once, or wait for some other opportunity. Turning to her at last, however, he said briefly, in a low, pained tone,—
“You must break off the engagement, Liane. You cannot marry him.”
“Cannot!” she gasped, her face turning pale. “Why?”
“Listen,” he continued huskily, coming closer to her, laying his big hand upon her shoulder, and looking down upon her tenderly. “Through all these years of prosperity and adversity you alone have been the one bright joy of my life. Your existence has kept me from going to the bad altogether; your influence has prevented me from sinking lower in degradation than I have already sunk. For me the facile pleasures of a stray man have ceased, because, for your sake, Liane, I gave up the old life and returned here to settle and become respectable. I admit that our life in England is a trifle tame after what we’ve been used to, but it will not, perhaps, be always so. At present my luck’s against me and we must wait in patience; therefore do not accept the first man’s offer of marriage. Life’s merely a game of rouge-et-noir. Sometimes you may win by waiting. Reflect well upon all the chances before you stake the maximum.”
“But George loves me, dad, and his family are wealthy,” she protested, meeting her father’s earnest gaze with her large grey eyes, in which stood unshed tears.
“I don’t doubt it, my girl,” he answered huskily. “I was young once. I, too, thought I loved a woman—your mother. I foolishly believed that she loved me better than anyone on earth. Ah! You wring from me my confession, because—because it should serve you as a lesson.” And he paused with bent head, while Liane held his strong but trembling hand. “It is a wretched story,” he went on in a low, harsh voice, “yet you should know it, you who would bind yourself to this man irrevocably. At the time this woman came into my life I was on leave down in the South of France, with wealth, happiness and bright prospects. I loved her and made her my wife. Then I went with my regiment to India, but already my future was blasted, for within a year of my marriage the glamour fell from my eyes and I knew that I had been duped. A fault committed by her threw such opprobrium upon me that I was compelled to throw up my commission, leave her and go back to England. I could not return to my friends in London, because she would discover and annoy me; therefore I have drifted hither and thither, falling lower and lower in the social scale, until, ruined and without means, I became a common blackleg and swindler. But it belongs to the past. It is dead, gone—gone for ever. Those years have gone and my youth has gone. I’ve lived like other men since then. Heaven knows it has not been a life to boast of, Liane. There have been days and years in it when I dared not trust myself to remember what had been—days of madness and folly, and months of useless apathy. Ah!” he sighed, “I was straight enough before my marriage, but my life was wrecked solely by that woman.”
His daughter listened intently, and when he had finished she echoed his deep sigh. Her father had never before told her the tragic story. She had always believed that her mother died of fever in India a year after marriage.
“Then my mother is not dead?” she observed reflectively.