“Deceived him?--yes--a thousand times and in a thousand ways. But I did it to make him happy. Am I really to blame? He expected so much of me--he had such hopes and such dreams of some great career for me. I _am_ a coward. I could not tell him that I was a weak, ordinary girl, that I could never realize his aspirations, that the mere knowledge that he depended and relied upon me weighed upon me and paralyzed every effort. When I loved him so could I tell him this? Could I tell him that his sacrifices were in vain, that the girl of whom he had boasted to every man in the mining camp was a complete failure?” She went over to the table and leaned her head upon her shaking hand. “If my mother--if I had had a brother or sister, it might have been different, but I was alone and I was all he had. And so I struggled on, half hoping that I might become something after all. But I confessed to myself what I could not to him, that I would never become a scholar, that my intellect was wholly superficial, that the verses I wrote were the veriest trash, that I was only doing what ninety-nine out of every hundred girls did, and that ninety-eight wrote better rhymes than I. There is a whole drawerful of my ‘poetry’”--she flung open a desk disdainfully--“until I could stand it no longer, and one day when he asked me to write something about the mountains, in desperation I copied those verses of Matthew Arnold’s. I knew he would never see them. After that it was easy to do so again.” She stopped and pressed her hands to her eyes. “I am the most miserable girl that lives,” she said. Miss Arnold looked at her coldly. “And the book?” she said at length. Miss Oldham lifted her head wearily. “It was all a falsehood. He kept asking me if I were not writing a book. He thought one had only to write a book to become famous. It seemed so easy not to oppose the idea, and little by little I fell into the habit of talking about ‘the book’ as if it were really being written. I did not try to explain to myself what I was doing. I simply drifted with the current of his desires and hopes. It may seem strange to you that a man like my father should have had such ambitions, and stranger still that he should have ever dreamed I could realize them. But one _has_ strange fancies alone with one’s self out on the mountains, and the isolation and self-concentration of the life give an intensity to any desire or expectation that you, who live in an ever-changing world, cannot understand.” Miss Arnold looked at the girl curiously. She wondered for the first time if there was any excuse for her. She had a singularly strong moral nature herself, and she could not quite understand this girl’s weakness and deceit. The fact that she loved her father so deeply only added to the mystery. She arose. “If I were you”--she began, coldly, but Miss Oldham stopped her.