"Father, he _is_ a true man," said Winifred, speaking low and with a timidity wholly new to her.
"I think so,--I earnestly believe it. He seems to me to have more ability, more strength, and more tenderness than he has shown yet. Some wrong ideas have twisted themselves persistently among the very fibres of his life and warped it; but it is not yet too late to tear them away."
"Some one else may do it," said Winifred, in exaggerated discouragement, "I let the opportunity slip by. He will never ask me again, and as for me--do you think I will ever go to any man with the offer of my love? Not if my heart broke for him!"
"Well, if he said it twice fifty times, it was a lie, or would have been if he had not believed it himself at the time. Never fear but you will have a chance to tell him that you have changed your mind, and without any wound to your pride either."
"Oh, Papa!" cried Winifred, rising and throwing her arms about his neck, "you are such a comfort!"
The old clock on the landing of the stairway struck one.
"There, it is morning already," said her father. "Off to bed with you, else I shall have no one to pour out my cup of coffee to-morrow." As he spoke, he gently unclasped her arms from about his neck, but she would not go quite yet.
"If--if--all this should ever come about, are you quite sure you would be willing to have me leave you?"
"Quite sure, my dear. It is the natural thing, and what is natural must be right. Now, good-night."
Winifred wiped away the tears which had been hanging on the fringe of her eyelashes, and after a parting hug gathered up her wraps and swept away to her room. Her father watched her tenderly till the last trace of her gown had vanished up the stairs; then he closed the door softly, took a miniature from its case in the drawer, laid it on the table, and bowed his head on both arms above it.
"'Father and Mother both.' Yes, that was what I promised, and that is what I must be so far as I can, and may God help me!" he murmured.
Despair fells; suspense tortures. The forty odd hours which lay between the ending of the Grahams' dinner and the promised interview with Winifred Anstice stretched out into an eternity to the impatience of Flint. By turns he tried occupation and diversion; yet his ear caught every tick of the clock, which seemed to his exaggerated fancy to have retarded its movement. He found it so impossible to work at his office that he packed up his papers and started for home.