“Why me above the rest?” she cried. “Am I likely to be the one to worry mamma?”
“The others have no particular affairs of their own to worry her with. There must be no private talks, no discussions, no endeavours to get her upon what you may suppose to be your side.”
Bee gave her father a glance of fire, but she felt that a little prudence was necessary, and kept the tumult of feeling which was within her as much as possible in her own breast. “I have always talked to mamma of everything that was in my mind,” she said, piteously. “I don’t know how I am to stop. She would wonder so if I stopped talking; and how can I talk to her except of things that are in my mind?”
“You must learn,” said the Colonel, “to think of her more than of yourself.” He did not at all mean to prescribe to her a course of conduct more elevated than that he meant to pursue himself, but then it was only in action that he meant to carry out his purposes, he was not afraid of committing himself in speech.
Bee looked at him again with a gaze that asked a great many questions, but she only answered, “I will try my very best, papa.”
“If you do, I am sure you will succeed, my dear,” he said, in a gentler tone.
Bee turned away towards the door, and then she paused and made a step back.
“Would you mind telling me--I will not say a word to her--but oh, please tell me--”
“What is it?” said the Colonel. He went to his writing table, and sitting down began to turn over his papers. His tone was slightly impatient, his eyebrows slightly raised, as if in surprise.
“Papa, you must know what it is. I know that you have seen--Mr. Leigh!”
“How do you know anything about it? What have you to do with whom I have seen? Run away. I do not mean to enter into any explanations on this subject with you.”
“Then with whom will you enter into explanations? You cannot speak to mamma; she must not be worried. Papa, I am not a little girl now, to be told to run away.”
“You seem to be determined not to lose a moment in telling me so.”
“I should not have told you so,” said Bee, looking at him over the high back of his writing-table, “if you had not told me I was not to talk to mamma.”
He looked up at her, and their eyes met; both of them keenly, fiercely blue, lit up with fires of combat. It is often imagined that blue eyes are the softest eyes--but not by those who are acquainted with the kind which belonged to the Kingswards, which might have been called sapphires, if sapphires ever flash and cut the air as diamonds do. They were not either so dark as sapphires--they were like nothing but themselves, two pairs of blue eyes that might have been made to order, so like were they to each other, and both blazing across that table as if they would have set the house on fire.