“Neither to-night nor to-morrow, papa,” she replied, in a vaguely troubled tone, for she began to feel alarmed at their persistency. “No, nor ever!” “Do you realize what you are saying, Aline?” Mr. Rodney inquired, in a strange, measured tone, and gazing deliberately into her grave, sweet, perfectly frank blue eyes. “Yes, papa, I realize it,” she replied, innocently. “You will stain the whiteness of your life, of your young womanhood, with a secret at whose nature no one can guess--you will deliberately place yourself under a ban. You will not reveal this strange secret even to your parents--do you mean all this, Aline?” he asked, agitatedly. “Yes, papa dear,” answered Aline. CHAPTER XX. Mr. Rodney gazed at his daughter for a few moments in blank silence. It had suddenly dawned upon him that, with all her childish ways and innocent young beauty, Aline was a woman in years. “Standing with reluctant feet, Where the brook and river meet, Womanhood and childhood fleet.” She was eighteen years old, but until to-night she had seemed like a child. She had the frank heart of a child, and her mother had never put her forward in society as a woman. The bloom had never been brushed from her heart by a lover. She had never had a secret from her parents in her life. She had been open, frank, and guileless, and singularly confiding. Her course now was utterly unlike Aline’s former ways--it was strange, unfilial, and incomprehensible. As he gazed at her silently now, the subtle change in her struck him most forcibly. It existed not only in her mind, but her face. Now that he looked at her more closely, he saw that Aline’s pretty oval face had grown thin and pale; her eyes, always large and bright, were more so than ever now. They were not the happy, careless eyes of the child Aline. They had a brooding shadow in them--a new expression, almost of pain. The red, smiling lips had acquired a certain gravity. There was a soul looking out of the beautiful pale face now, illumining its ethereal loveliness like the light behind a crystal vase. “Some new experience of life has come to the child since she left us. Her mind is expanded and developed into that of a woman,” he said to himself. With that thought came trouble, sorrow, and vague regret, mixed with a certain horror of the mystery she persisted in throwing around the months of her absence. Tremblingly he asked himself what did that strange reserve mean? Was it the impenetrable veil thrown around a disgraceful secret?