d in her
pulses. Defiant words rushed to her lips, but remained unsaid, because
something grotesque about his attempted movement in his chair
accentuated his helplessness and made her remember.

"What do you mean?" she asked in a level voice, which since she had
suppressed the passion came a little faint and uncertain.

"I had no objection," he replied quietly enough but with that inflexible
intonation which automatically arouses antagonism, since it puts into
its "I want's" and its "I don't want's" a tyrannical finality, "to this
young gentleman visiting us. I extended him hospitality. I even liked
him. But it has come rather too much, for my liking, to a thing that can
be summed up in your words of a minute ago--'Stuart and I.' It's time to
bring it to an end."

"Why should it come to an end, Father?" she asked with a terrific effort
to speak calmly.

"Because it might run to silly sentiment--and to such an idea I could
never give consent. This young man, though a gentleman by birth, is not
our sort of a gentleman. His blood is not the kind of blood with which
ours can be mixed: his ideas are the loose ideas that put pleasure above
righteousness. In short, while I wish to say good-by to him as agreeably
as I said welcome, the time has come to say good-by."

She came over and sat by his chair and let one hand rest on his white
hair. "Father," she said in a low voice, tremulously repressed, "you are
undertaking to rule offhand on a question which is too vital to my life
to be treated with snap judgment. I've tried to meet your wishes and I
want to go on trying, but in this you must think well before you take a
position so--so absolute that perhaps--"

He shook her hand away and his eyes blazed.

"I _have_ thought well," he vehemently declared. "I have not only
thought, but I have prayed. I have waited silently and watched in an
effort to be just. I have asked God's guidance."

"God's guidance could hardly have told you that Stuart Farquaharson has
loose ideas or that he's unrighteous or that his blood could corrupt our
blood--because none of those things are true or akin to the truth."

For an instant the old man gazed at her in an amazement which turned
quickly to a wrath of almost crazily blazing eyes, and his utterance
came with a violence of fury.

"Do you mean that such an unspeakable idiocy has already come to
pass--that you and this--this--young amateur jockey and card-player from
the South--" He brok