she expect of life? Was she not as other women? Did she never
look ahead? Had she no pride, no ambition--no hopes? Did she wish
never to marry, then, to become an _old mees_ like her English
companion?

"I am but eighteen," she said quiveringly. "Oh, my father, do not
give me to this unknown--"

"Unknown--unknown! Do I not know him?"

"But you promised--"

Angrily he gestured with his cigarette. "Do I know what is good for
you or do I not? Have I your interest at heart--tell me! Am I a
savage, a dolt--"

"But you do not know what it is to be unhappy. I beg of you, my
father,--I should die with such a life before me, with such a man
for my husband. I am too French, too like my mother--"

"Ah, your mother!... Too French, are you?... But what would you have
in France?" he demanded with the bursting appearance of a man
making every effort to restrain himself within unreasonable bounds.
"Would not your parents there arrange your marriage? You might see
the fiance," he caught the words out of her mouth, "but only for a
time or two--after the arrangements--and what is that? What more
would you know than what your father knows? Are you a thing to be
exhibited--given to a man to gaze at and appraise? I tell you,
no.... You are my daughter. You bear my name. And when you marry you
marry in the sanctity of the custom of your father--and you go to
your husband's house as his mother went to his father."

Timidly she protested, "But my mother--and you--"

"Do not speak of your mother! If she were here she would counsel
gratitude and obedience." He turned his back on her. "This is what
comes," he muttered, "of this modernity, this education...."

He pitched away his stub as if he were casting all that he hated
away with it.

She had never seen him so angry. Helplessly she felt that his vanity
and his word were engaged with the general more than she had
dreamed. She felt a surge of panic at the immensity of the trouble
before her.

"But, my father, if you love me--"

"No, my little one, if _you_ love _me_!"

With a sudden assumption of good humor over the angry red mottling
his olive cheeks, he came and sat beside her, putting his arm about
her silently shrinking figure.

"I am a weak fool to stay and drink a woman's tears, as the saying
goes," he told her, "but this is what a man gets for being good
natured.... But, tears or not, I know what is best.... Come, Aimee,
have I not ever been fond of you--?"

He patted