"This isn't a time to be kind, my dear." His voice was quivering like her own. "I'm bungling it--I'm bungling it--but you must let me stumble along and try to show you what I mean. You will have your work, your crowded schools, to which you'll be able to give your life. But I look ahead, I who know you--and I don't see you happy, I don't even see you whole. For you there will be no family. None of the intimate sorrows and joys that have been in this house will come to you. I look back and I see them all--for a man who has come so near the end gets a larger vision." He shut his eyes, his jaw set tight. "I look into my family back and back, and I see how it has been made of many generations. Certain figures stand out in my mind--they cover over a hundred years. And I see how much they've meant to me. I see that I've been one of them--a link in a long chain of lives--all inter-bound and reaching on. In my life they have all been here--as I shall be in lives to come. "And this is what I want for you." He held her close a moment. The tears were rolling down her cheeks. "Until now you have been one of us, too. You have never once been free. You have been the one in this house to step in and take hold and try to decide what's best to be done. I'm not putting you up on a pedestal, I don't say you've made no mistakes--but I say you're the kind of a woman who craves what's in a family. You're the one of my daughters who has loved this house the most!" "Yes," she said, "I've loved this house--" "But now for you all this will stop--quite suddenly," he told her. "This house of ours will soon be sold. And within a few months I shall be dead, and your family will have dropped out of your life." "Stop! Can't you? Stop! It's brutal! It isn't true about you!" she cried. "I won't believe it!" Her voice broke. "Go and see my physician," he said. "How long have you known it? Why didn't you tell me?" "Because we had troubles enough as it was, other things to think of. But there's only one thing now, this freedom you are facing." "Please! Please!" she cried imploringly. "I don't want to talk of myself but of you! This physician--"