The question was very, very difficult for him, so difficult that for a moment he could find no answer. At last he said slowly, “I don’t believe Hugh is the man to make you happy.”
“Don’t you think I am the best judge of that?” Helen said gently—quickly.
The girl lost something of her self-control then, and there was a pitiful note in the young voice saying: “Daddy, this isn’t all a silly joke? You aren’t trying to tease me?”
“I’m not joking, Helen.” There were tears in his voice.
“Then,” she cried, “why have you suddenly changed towards Hugh? Our house has always been his home—all these years. I can only just remember when he came: I can’t remember when he was not here. You have purposely thrown us together.” There was accusation in her tone, but no anger.
She had pricked him, and he answered sharply: “I never said that it was my wish that you should marry him.”
“Not in words—no—but in a hundred other ways. Why have you changed? Why?”
Richard Bransby was suffering terribly—and physically too. He yearned over her, and he ached to get it over and done. But he could not bring himself to denounce the boy he had loved so—so loved still.
But Helen, at bay too, would give him no respite: how could she? “You haven’t answered me—yet,” she said, more coldly. Her tone was still gentle; but her fixed determination was quite evident—unmistakable.
“Very well, then, I will,” and he gathered himself for the ordeal, his—and hers. Then again he hesitated. “Helen,” he pleaded, “won’t you accept my decision? You—you know a little—just a little—what you are to me—how all the world—ah! my Helen—you wouldn’t break my old heart, would you? Say that you could not—would not—say it——”
“Daddy,” her tears had come now—near; but she held them—“I mean to marry Hugh,” she said very quietly—even in his distressed agitation he recognized and honored her grit—the wonderful grit of such delicate creatures—“with your approval, I hope—but, in any case, I mean to marry him.”
“Think how I’ve loved you, child,” the father cried, catching her wrists in his hands, “you wouldn’t set my wishes aside?”
“Just think for a moment,” she said, “he has given up everything to join the army. Any day, now, he may go—out there. He loves me, Daddy—and I love him.”