‘Lucille, why do you turn from me? My dearest, why this discouraging silence? Do my words pain you? I had dared to hope they would not be unwelcome, that you must have expected to hear them. You must have known that I loved you, ever so long ago, for I have loved you from the very first.’ ‘You have been very good to me,’ she said, in a low broken voice. ‘Good to you!’ ‘So good that I have sometimes thought you—liked me a little.’ (A woman’s periphrasis; feminine lips hardly dare utter that mighty word ‘love.’) ‘But if it is really so—which seems almost too much for me to believe’ (if he could but have seen the proud happy look in her eyes as she said that!) ‘I can only beg you never to say any more about it—until—’ ‘Until what, Lucille?’ exclaimed Lucius impatiently. He had not expected to find hindrance or stumbling-block in the way of his happiness here. From Homer Sivewright there would no doubt be opposition, but surely not here. Had he so grossly deceived himself when he believed his love returned? ‘Until my life is changed from what it is now, such a broken life, the merest fragment of a life,’ answered Lucille quietly. ‘How can I think of returning the affection you speak of—you so worthy to be loved—while I am in this miserable state of uncertainty about my father—not knowing if he is living or dead, fortunate or unhappy? I can never give my heart to any one, however noble’—with a lingering tenderness which might have told him that he was beloved—‘until all doubts are cleared upon that one subject. Until then, I belong to my father. At any moment he might appear to claim me; and I am his’—with a passionate emphasis—‘his, by the memory of that childhood, when I loved him so dearly. Let him order me to follow him to the other end of the world, and I should go—without one fear, without one regret.’ Lucius was silent for some moments, stung to the quick. Was a mere memory, the very shadow of her childhood’s affection, so much nearer to her than his deep unselfish love—his love, which might brighten her dull life in the present, and open a fair vista of future happiness—that hopeful active love, which was to make a home for her, and win fame for him in the days to come, always for her sake? ‘What, Lucille,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you hold my love so lightly that it can count for nothing when weighed against the memory of a father who deserted you—who has let all the years of your girlhood go by without making the faintest attempt to claim you, or even to see you?’ ‘How do I know what may have prevented him?’ she asked—‘what barrier may have stood between him and me? Death perhaps. He did not desert me.’ ‘Was not his sudden departure from your grandfather’s house desertion of you?’ ‘No. He was driven away. I am very sure of that. My grandfather was hard and cruel to him.’