Simon Hart, with a sensation of fear and guilt, did not wait to hear more. Pushing aside the strings of beads, the rattling of which jarred intolerably on his nerves, he entered the coquettish apartment. As he approached Rachel, avoiding collision with the divers chairs, screens, tables with which the place was littered, his face revealed little of what he was feeling. On perceiving him, she half rose. Her breath grew short--or did he imagine it?--her eyes narrowed, then filled once more with the irradiating light of happiness. As their hands met he observed that her cheeks were glowing. Only her extreme slenderness and her cropped head told the story of recent illness. "Oh, such news!" she cried, striving to repress her excitement. "Here, sit down," indicating a chair beside her own, "and Emily, you tell him." And as the little toy-maker took up the tale, Rachel looked into his face. But hardly had Emily opened her lips than she was silenced. "No, no, I'll tell him myself. What do you think! _I've heard from my Father_! He has never seen me, I have never seen him, but suddenly he sends some money." Here Rachel's eyes shot a question--or again, did he imagine it? "But you haven't exactly heard from him," Emily Short interrupted; "you don't know anything positively." At these words, to Simon's relief, Rachel turned from him. "But I tell you I do know something positively, and that's enough," with a gesture of pride, "if I never hear anything more. He sent this money to my mother. Do you suppose that explains nothing to me?" All at once she was the incarnation of tenderness and defiance. She had retained from childhood a picture of her father limned in the quaint language of old David. Now she in turn presented the portrait to these strangers. In the light of that mystical tribunal, buttressed so strongly by love and imagination, Thomas Beckett stood forth a figure vastly human, passionate and compelling; and she defied them to judge him otherwise. But all at once she ceased twisting the tassels which adorned her girdle and dropped her chin in the cup of her hand. "Sometimes I feel that it was all owing to the sea," she continued; "had we lived further inland I believe Father wouldn't have left us. For the land is stationary, even the trees are tied to it by the foot; while the sea--every drop is free. It can dash and gnaw its way through the hardest substances. But man is not like the sea. He may hurl himself upon life, yes--" The sentence concluded in a sigh. At the beginning of this agitated speech Simon had gazed at her with anxious curiosity; then he grew jealous of this father who drew her thoughts so far afield from all he knew or sympathized with. He began to congratulate her. She did not heed him.