"Father--my father!" She advanced toward him, but recalling the shudder with which he had shaken her arms from his shoulders, she stepped back to the threshold. "Oh, father, you are cruel! You know you are breaking my heart!" The sob, the passion of pain in her voice, smote and hurt him sorely, but he did not falter an instant. "In breaking your will, your heart may be healed." He had not looked at her, and all the while the index finger of his right hand moved up and down columns of figures, searching for some item, which was finally found and marked. Leaning against the door, she watched him until Aaron rang the dinner bell. "Father, may I drive you to the station?" "No." "Then I prefer to say good-bye here, as I am going to my own room." "As you please. Good-bye, Eglah." "I wish I could share this trouble, whatever it may be that calls you away; but since you elect to condemn me to the torture of suspense, I have no alternative but to endure it as best I can. Good-bye, my dear father." She held out both hands, but, instead of approaching her, he opened a glass door leading to the colonnade and disappeared. The velvet, paternal touch caressing her tenderly from the days of her babyhood had, during the last two years, stiffened, hardened into a steel gauntlet, strangling her. The betrayal of his selfish and unscrupulous desire to violate the provisions of the will had painfully startled and keenly mortified her; but the barb that sank deepest in her sore, aching heart was the realization of her father's deliberate plan to humiliate and punish her. Was his persistent effort to force a marriage with Mr. Herriott based on the determination to hasten her unlimited control of her grandmother's estate? Until now, this explanation had not occurred to her, because the clause binding her to the trusteeship--which rankled ceaselessly in his mind--had made no impression on her memory. Maturely she deliberated, weighing the past in the light of the new supposition, but this solution was rejected as inadequate. In view of Mr. Herriott's indefinite absence and studied silence, her father's obstinate adherence to his matrimonial ultimatum remained inexplicable. That day ended her overtures for reconciliation; and she laid the ax to the root of her olive tree. The next morning was Sunday--the first after their return--and she ordered the carriage. "Little mother, I am going with you to eleven o'clock service, and I am sure you understand it is a tribute of respect to grandmother, that after many years of absence I attend first the church she helped to build." Curious eyes watched for Miss Kent in another church, where her father had worshipped, and carried her mother, and when, daintily robed in white, Eglah walked with the overseer's wife along the Methodist aisle and sat down in the Maurice pew, a sudden mist blurred the vision of many in the congregation, and old Dr. Eggleston wiped his spectacles and whispered to his wife: