She really did not know, and did not want to know, what her guardian meant by his strange speech any more than by his strange manner. “She understood a horror in his words, but not his words.” She felt a sudden abhorrence of his person that sent her flying from his presence. And now, in the seclusion of her own room, her overwrought feelings broke forth in a flood of tears. These relieved her, and then she began to ask herself the cause of all this excessive emotion. She could discover no reasonable cause. Her guardian had been as kind, or even kinder, than usual. He had only looked at her very intently, and asked her if she knew why he thanked Heaven that there was no blood relationship between them; and he had taken her hand in his to draw her nearer to him. Now, what was there in all this to turn her sick even to faintness? To fill her with terror and disgust? To make her fling his hands off and rush from the room? She could not tell. She said to herself that she had behaved very rudely, harshly, unkindly! Whatever her guardian had meant by his strange behavior, he had meant no evil. How could he mean evil? No, he had meant none; of that she felt quite sure all the time. And yet she had rushed rudely away from him, and hurt him who had never meant anything other than good to her, and she felt very sorry for her own conduct. “I am too impulsive. Uncle always told me I was too impulsive. Even the mother-superior of the Sacred Heart Convent school used to tell me that unless I watched and prayed I would some day commit some fatal error on an impulse that might ruin my life. Yes, I am too impulsive. I must learn self-control, and not worry others because I cannot understand them. I have hurt my good uncle, who means me nothing but good, and I must try to make amends to him,” she said to herself. But—she called him her “good uncle,” and not her “dee-ar Marcel,” and even in her tender compunction she felt a latent misgiving, a vague fear of some wrong or woe into which this sweet penitence might lead her. “If I only had a mother,” she sighed. Meanwhile, in the library, Marcel de Crespigney held an interview with himself full of bitter self-reproach and lamentations. “I have alarmed and repelled her by too sudden an approach. And yet I thought that six months of the close companionship and easy intercourse of travel, together with the affection and confidence she has always shown to me, had prepared the way to a nearer and dearer union! But I have been too impatient, too hasty, too importunate. I should have approached her gradually, gently. I should have remembered that she is not quite like other girls. She is very delicate, dainty, refined, sensitive—yea, a very mimosa, that shrinks and trembles at a rude breath or touch. I must be patient, very patient for weeks, for months, if I hope to win her hand.” CHAPTER XI TERROR