n it had origin, and the stream of tendency came down
through long generations, by courses unknown to him.

"Marry him--you want to marry him!" he gasped. "You, my Zoe, want to
marry that tramp of a Protestant!"

Her eyes blazed in anger. Tramp--the man with the air of a young
Alexander, with a voice like the low notes of the guitar thrown to the
flames! Tramp!

"If I love him I ought to marry him," she answered with a kind of
calmness, however, though all her body was quivering. Suddenly she came
close to her father, a great sympathy welled up in her eyes, and her
voice shook.

"I do not want to leave you, father, and I never meant to do so. I never
thought of it as possible; but now it is different. I want to stay with
you; but I want to go with him too."

Presently as she seemed to weaken before him, he hardened. "You can't
have both," he declared with as much sternness as was possible to him,
and with a Norman wilfulness which was not strength. "You shall
not marry an actor and a Protestant. You shall not marry a man like
that--never--never--never. If you do, you will never have a penny of
mine, and I will never--"

"Oh, hush--Mother of Heaven, hush!" she cried. "You shall not put a
curse on me too."

"What curse?" he burst forth, passion shaking him. "You cursed my
mother's baptism. It would be a curse to be told that you would see
me no more, that I should be no more part of this home. There has been
enough of that curse here.... Ah, why--why--" she added with a sudden
rush of indignation, "why did you destroy the only thing I had of hers?
It was all that was left--her guitar. I loved it so."

All at once, with a cry of pain, she turned and ran to the
door--entering on the staircase which led to her room. In the doorway
she turned.

"I can't help it. I can't help it, father. I love him--but I love you
too," she cried. "I don't want to go--oh, I don't want to go! Why do
you--?" her voice choked; she did not finish the sentence; or if she
did, he could not hear.

Then she opened the door wide, and disappeared into the darkness of
the unlighted stairway, murmuring, "Pity--have pity on me, holy Mother,
Vierge Marie!" Then the door closed behind her almost with a bang.

After a moment of stupefied inaction Jean Jacques hurried over and
threw open the door she had closed. "Zoe--little Zoe, come back and
say good-night," he called. But she did not hear, for, with a burst of
crying, she had hurried into her