As a burning building lends its heat to all beside it, so was my own soul kindled, half with rapture and half with anger, by the story of Margaret's passion. Father's and daughter's hearts were never pressed closer to each other than were mine and my only child's.
It was the succeeding Sunday night that Margaret, in her father's arms, breathed out the tender tale; I was enjoying my evening smoke (a post-sermonic anodyne), but long before Margaret had finished, my cigar was in ashes and my heart in flame.
"Father," she began, her face hidden on my shoulder, "I am either very happy or very wretched, and I cannot decide which till I know which you will be."
"The old problem, daughter, is it not?" I answered. "Still longing to enter a hospital? And you want to wheedle your old father into giving you up?" for Margaret, like every other modern girl, had been craving entrance to that noble calling. The high-born and the love-lorn, those weary of life, or of love, or both, find a refuge there.
"No, father, I was not thinking of that at all. I don't want to be a nurse any more."
"What is it then? You have never had any secrets from your father and you will not have any now, will you, dear one?"
"Oh, father, I will tell you all I can--but I cannot tell you all."
I started in my chair, for the child note was absent from her words, and the passion of womanhood was in its stead. Awesome to a father's heart is that moment wherein a daughter's voice unconsciously asserts the suffrage of her soul.
"Go on, my daughter--tell me what you may," I said, for I knew now that the realm was one wherein parental authority was of no avail.
Only silence followed; her lips spoke no word, but the heaving bosom had a rhetoric all its own and told me that a new life, begotten not of mine, was throbbing there. An alien life it seemed to me, a soul's expansion beyond the province of my own, an infinitude which denied the sway of even a father's love. At length she spoke:
"Oh, father, I will tell you all--that is, all I can. But I am so lonely. You cannot follow me, father. I have gone away in--with another--in where you cannot go."
"What mean you, Margaret? In where? Where can I not come?" I asked, perplexed.