She was at the door. She came in as he asked the question. She looked from her lover to her father, and then she ran to her father and put her head on his shoulder.
§6. Luke took a short breath. He wanted to leave them. He felt that he could not face much more. He wondered what Forbes had said to her and how much she had heard of what Forbes and he were saying.
"Betty!" said her father. He patted her head. Luke thought that the caressing hand looked old. "Betty!"
"It isn’t that, Betty." Luke was angry. The girl was behaving as he thought that a girl placed as she was ought to behave, and he loved her no less for that, but he was angry at her father’s weakness in putting her in such a position, "It isn’t that, Betty, I’ve got to do it. You don’t understand these things. You can’t understand them."
"She knows that _I_ understand them," Forbes interposed.
"What of it?" challenged Luke. "Betty, I’ve got to do what I think’s right. You wouldn’t have me go against everything I believe, would you? You wouldn’t have me do something I thought was wrong?"
"I’ll withdraw from the company," he said.
"I couldn’t buy you out," Forbes answered. He bit his lip; shame colored his cheeks. "And if you sold to anybody else it would be sure to be letting in our enemies. Even the mere report that you wanted to sell would wreck us, coming on top of those bank interviews."
"Betty," he said, "a lot of men that believe in me are going to offer me this nomination. It’s a nomination to a place that makes its holder an officer of the court, an officer of justice, yet the plain truth is your father wants me to let these other men’s money, or the power of their money, buy me off from doing justice to them."
"Nonsense!" Forbes was strengthened by his daughter’s meed of comfort. "You won’t be elected if you are nominated."
"And somebody else," urged Betty, "could do just as well against them, Luke."
"That’s not the point, Betty. It’s a personal question, a question of personal morals; it’s a matter of my own conscience."
She turned until she stood no longer between the two men. She stood at her father’s side. Her cheeks were damp from weeping, but her eyes shone.
"But think, Luke," she said. "You _are_ young. Father’s twice as old, and he _must_ know more. He must be right. He wouldn’t ask you to do anything that was wrong, would you, father?"