s she did one day, seven
years before, when, coming home from over the hills, she had stepped
into a house where Horror brooded as palpably as though it sat beside
the fire, or hung above the family table. She had felt something as soon
as she had entered the door that far-off day, though the house seemed
empty. It was an emptiness which was filled with a torturing presence or
torturing presenes. It had stilled her young heart. What was it? She
had learned the truth soon enough. Out of the sunset had come her father
with a face twisted with misery, and as she ran to him, he had caught
her by both shoulders, looked through her eyes to something far beyond,
and hoarsely said: "She is gone--gone from us! She has run away from
home! Curse her baptism--curse it, curse it!"

Zoe could never forget these last words she had ever heard her father
speak of Carmen. They were words which would make any Catholic shudder
to hear. It was a pity he had used them, for they made her think at last
that her mother had been treated with injustice. This, in spite of the
fact that in the days, now so far away, when her mother was with them
she had ever been nearer to her father, and that, after first childhood,
she and her mother were not so close as they had been, when she went to
sleep to the humming of a chanson of Cadiz. Her own latent motherhood,
however, kept stealing up out of the dim distances of childhood's
ignorance and, with modesty and allusiveness, whispering knowledge in
her ear. So it was that now she looked back pensively to the years she
had spent within sight and sound of her handsome mother, and out of the
hunger of her own spirit she had come to idealize her memory. It was
good to have a loving father; but he was a man, and he was so busy just
when she wanted--when she wanted she knew not what, but at least to go
and lay her head on a heart that would understand what was her sorrow,
her joy, or her longing.

And now here at last was come Crisis, which showed its thunderous
head in the gay dance, and shook his war-locks in the fire, where her
mother's guitar had shrieked in its last agony.

When all the guests had gone, when the bolts had been shot home, and old
Seraphe Corniche had gone to bed, father and daughter came face to face.

There was a moment's pause, as the two looked at each other, and then
Zoe came up to Jean Jacques to kiss him good-night. It was her way of
facing the issue. Instinctively she knew that he