"Mr. Clancy, I will not listen a moment longer to such preposterous language. You are passing far beyond the limits of my forbearance. If your conscience is burdened on my account because I am so 'unfriended,' I absolve you fully. You will and do know how to console yourself. Our interview must end here and now. It were disloyalty for me to listen a moment longer. We are strangers from this day forth, Mr. Clancy." And she rose flushed and trembling. He also rose, and with an intent look which held her gaze, said gently: "There is that which will speak although I am banished." "What?" "Your heart." "If it broke a thousand times I will not speak to you again," she cried passionately. "Even if you were right it would be ignoble to suggest such a thing. Truly your associations have led you far from the promise of your youth." "I have not said that your heart would plead for me," he replied sternly. "But it _will_ plead against all that is unnatural, contrary to your young girlhood, contrary to the true, right instincts which God has created. You may seek to stifle its voice, but you cannot. When you are alone it will tell you, like the still small voice of God, that your obdurate will is wrong, that your narrow prejudices and morbid memories are all wrong and vain;--it will tell you that you cannot become the wife of this man, who would sacrifice you as a solace to his remaining years, without wrecking your happiness for life. Farewell, Mara Wallingford. There is one thing you can never forget--that I warned you." He bowed low and departed immediately. CHAPTER XXIV "THE IDEA!" Mara was not the kind of girl that faints or goes into hysterics. The spirit of her father was aroused to the last degree. She felt that she had been arraigned and condemned by one who had no right to do either; that all the cherished traditions of her life had been trampled upon; that her father's loved companion-in-arms, and her dear friend, had been insulted. Even wise, saintly Mrs. Bodine, her genial counsellor, had been ignored. "Was there ever such monstrous assumption!" she cried, as she paced back and forth with clinched hands. She soon heard the step of Mrs. Hunter, and became outwardly calm. "Well?" said her aunt. "He won't come again, nor shall I speak to him again. Let these facts content you, aunty." "That much at least is satisfactory," said Mrs. Hunter, "but I think it was a wretched mistake to see him at all." "It was not a mistake, for he has revealed the depths into which a man can sink who adopts his course. I have some respect for an out-and-out Northerner, brought up as such; but it does seem that when a man turns traitor, as it were, he goes to greater lengths than those whose camp he joins. He suspects those who are too noble for him to understand." "Whom does Mr. Clancy suspect?" "Oh, all of us. He came to advise me as an unprotected, unfriended, unguided girl." "Was there ever such impudence on the face of the earth!"