"Thank you," he acknowledged. He went to the door, opened it and went out; he closed it after him and left her alone.
Harriet stood an instant vacantly staring after him; then she went to the door and fastened it with a catch. She came back to the great table-desk--her blind father's desk--and seated herself in the great chair, his chair, and buried her face in her hands. She had seemed--and she knew that she had seemed--quite composed as she talked to Eaton; now she was not composed. Her face was burning hot; her hands, against her cheeks, were cold; tremors of feeling shook her as she thought of the man who just had left her. Why, she asked herself, was she not able to make herself treat this man in the way that her mind told her she should have treated him? That he might be the one who had dealt the blow intended to kill her father--her being could not and would not accept that. Yet, the only reason she had to deny it, was her feeling.
That Eaton must have been involved in the attack or, at least, must have known and now knew something about it which he was keeping from them, seemed certain. Yet she did not, she could not, abominate and hate this man. Instead, she found herself impelled, against all natural reason, more and more to trust him. Moreover, was it fair to her father for her to do this?
Since childhood, since babyhood, even, no one had ever meant anything to her in comparison with her father. Her mother had died when she was young; she had never had, in her play as a child, the careless abandon of other children, because in spite of play she had been thinking of her father; the greatest joy of childhood she could remember was walking hand in hand with her father and telling him the things she saw; it had been their "game"; and as she grew older and it had ceased to be merely a game--as she had grown more and more useful to the blind man, and he had learned more fully to use and trust her--she had found it only more interesting, a greater pleasure. She had never had any other ambition--and she had no other now--except to serve her father; her joy was to be his eyes; her triumph had been when she had found that, though he searched the world and paid fortunes to find others to "see" for him, no one could serve him as she could; she had never thought of herself apart from him.