“It’ll happen, just the same,” he assured her, grimly. “Nothing on earth that we’ve done has been able to make her see this cub except as an angel—a persecuted angel. She really meant it when she called him that;—on my soul, I believe she did! We’ve told her the truth about him over and over till the repetition makes us sick. What effect does it have on her? We’ve told her what his own father said about him, that he’s ‘absolutely no good on earth and never will be!’ What help was that? Then we tried having other people tell her their opinions of Crabbe. It only made her hate the other people. We’ve tried indulgence; we made the greatest effort to interest her in other things; we’ve tried to get her interested in other young men; we’ve tried giving her anything she wanted; we’ve tried to get her to travel; offered her Europe, Asia, and the whole globe; and then when she wouldn’t go and everything else we tried was no good, we tried taking the whole thing as a joke—making good-natured fun of this cub; trying to make her see him as ridiculous—and the end of that was her first attempt to run away with him! Well, she did it again, and if we keep on as we’re going she’ll do it _again_! What’s our alternative? I ask you!” His wife could only moan that she didn’t know;—her mind as well as her emotion was exhausted, she said; and the only thing she could suggest now was that he should try to get Lily to come down to dinner. He assented gloomily, “Well, I’ll see, though it makes me sick to listen to her when she’s like this,” and went upstairs to his daughter’s room. After he had knocked repeatedly upon the door, obtaining only the significant response of silence, he turned the knob, found himself admitted into darkness, and pressed a button upon the wall just inside the door. The light, magically instantaneous, glowed from the apricot-coloured silk shades of two little lamps on slender tables, one at each side of the daintily painted bed;—and upon the soft green coverlet, with her fair and delicate head upon the lace pillow, lay his daughter. With hands pressed palm to palm upon her breast, her attitude was that of a crusader’s lady in stone upon a tomb; and the closed eyes, the exquisite white profile, thin with suffering, the slender, long outline of her figure, could not fail to touch a father’s heart. For the wasting of long-drawn anguish was truly sculptured there, even though the attitude might have been a little calculated. “Lily,” he said, gently, as he approached the bed, “your mother wants to know if you wouldn’t like to come down to dinner.” The dark eyelids remained as they were; but the pale lips just moved. “No, thank you.” “You won’t?” “No.” “Then shall we send your dinner up to you, Lily?” “No, thank you,” she whispered.