She had almost got her courage up to the point of deciding to disappear in the crowd at Albany, and so elude the people with whom she was expected to journey to her home, when, to her dismay, she looked down at the landing-place where they were stopping, a few miles below Albany, and saw her father coming on board the boat. He had not expected to be able to meet her and had written that she was to come with acquaintances of his. Her heart stood still in panic, and for a moment she looked wildly at the rail of the steamer, as if she might climb over and escape. Then in a moment her father had seen her and stood beside her. He stooped and kissed her forehead coldly, almost shyly. This startled her, too, for he had not kissed her since the days before her mother was sent away, and a strange, sharp pain went through her heart, a pang of things that might have been. She looked up in wonder. She did not know how like her dead mother she had grown. But the stern face was cold as ever, and his voice conveyed no smallest part of the emotion he felt at sight of her lovely face. He talked to her gravely of her school life, and then he went on to speak of the Winthrop family, and to tell her in detail bits of its history calculated to make her understand its importance. Dawn listened with growing alarm at the thought of all that would be expected of her. Yet not a breath of her trouble did she allow her father to see. It might have made a difference if she could have known how her father’s heart was aching with the anguish of his great mistake, and perhaps if the father could have known the breaking of the young heart it might have melted the coldness of his reserve and brought some sympathy to the surface. But they could not see, and the agony went on. Dawn walked sadly, reluctantly, into the unloved, unloving home. As the days dragged by, she grew to have a haunted look, and the rose flush on her sweet round cheek faded to a marble white, while under her eyes were dark circles. Her father saw the look, but knew not what it meant. Yet it pierced his soul, for it was the same look that her mother had worn in her coffin, and he was the readier to have the marriage hastened, both for her sake and his own, for he realized she was not happy here in the home where there was so much to remind her of what had passed. He felt she never would forgive him, and that her only hope was to be happily married. Winthrop had so represented her feelings to him that he had taken it for granted she was only too eager to go to a home of her own.