“Aline was very angry, when she recovered consciousness and found that I was determined not to apprise her parents of her situation. I told her that she should never leave Delaney House until she swore solemnly never to divulge the secret of her whereabouts and the manner in which she came by her wound. She refused in the bitterest terms at first, declaring that she would never keep the secret from her parents. I told her that she should never even see them again until she obeyed my dictation.” “My poor girl!” sighed Aline’s father. “I was hard and cruel; I recognize it now, although I did not then comprehend the enormity of what I was doing,” said Oran Delaney. “Aline was bitterly angry. She declared that she would never submit to such injustice; and she worked herself up into such a state that she became dangerously ill. There were six weeks when we nursed her night and day, scarcely believing that she would live from one day to another.” “And yet you would not let us know! I do not believe that I can ever forgive you,” cried Mr. Rodney. “I can never forgive myself,” Mr. Delaney answered, sadly. “But I was willfully blind; I never once realized the full enormity of my offense against you and your daughter--my selfish misery made me desperate. I was agonized by her sufferings, but I never once relented. When she at length convalesced and renewed her entreaties to go home, I steadily refused to allow her to do so until she had bound herself to solemn silence. She was as obdurate as I was, at first. She affirmed that she would never do so. But, at the end of three months, her girlish patience gave way, and, in her anxiety to see her dear ones again, she weakened and solemnly bound herself to all that I asked her. Then, after telling me, in a gush of girlish passion, that she hated me, she went home.” He paused, and there was a deep silence in the room. He was thinking of the night when the graceful young figure had flitted out from the doors of Delaney House, leaving it darker and more gloomy than ever. He recalled the last moment of her stay, when, with her small hand clinched in bitter, impotent wrath, she had said, scathingly: “I hate you, Oran Delaney, for all that you have made me suffer!” The words had pierced his heart like a sword point. They had remained with him ever since, growing harder to bear day by day. He could not bear that those frank blue eyes should rest on him with hate and scorn. It was like a wound in his heart. CHAPTER LVIII. Mr. Rodney was thinking too. He remembered the night that Aline had come home. All that was strange in her manner then was explained away now. He remembered how hard and stern he had been with her; how he had been goaded to desperation by the fear that she was a miserable sinner. A weight of care was lifted from his mind by Oran Delaney’s revelation.