r fingers nervously together,
but did not speak. Westwood waited for a minute or two, and then
resumed--this time very bitterly.

"It's always so! The lover always drives the parent out of the young
folks' hearts. For this man--that you haven't known more than a few
months, I suppose--you'd give up your father to worse than the
gallows--to the misery of a life sentence--and be glad, maybe, to see
the last of him! If it was him or me, you would save him--and perhaps
you're in the right of it. I wish," said the man, turning away his
face--"I wish to God that I'd never come back to England, nor seen the
face of my girl again!"

Cynthia had been physically incapable hitherto of stemming the flow of
his words; but now, although she was trembling with excitement and
sorrow and indignation, she answered her father's accusation resolutely.

"You are wrong, father. I will not sacrifice you to him. But you must
not expect me to sacrifice him to you either. My heart is large enough
to hold you both."

There was a pathos in the tone of her last few words which impressed
even Westwood's not very plastic nature. He turned towards her, noting
with half-unconscious anxiety the whiteness of the girl's lips, the
shadow that seemed to have descended upon her eyes. He put out his rough
hand and touched her daintily gloved fingers.

"Don't be put out by what I say, my girl! If I speak sharp, it's because
I feel deep. I won't be hard on any one you care for, I give you my
word; but it'll be the best thing for you to be fair and square with me
and tell me all about him. Are you going to marry him?"

"He wishes to marry me," said Cynthia, yielding, with a sigh; "but there
has been an arrangement--a sort of family arrangement, I understand--by
which he must--ought to marry a young lady in two years, when she is
twenty or twenty-one, if she consents and if she is strong enough. She
is ill now, and she does not seem to care for him. That is all I know. I
have promised to marry him if he is free at the end of the two years."

It sounded a lame story--worse, when she told it, than when she had
discussed it with Hubert Lepel or wept over it in her own room. Westwood
uttered a growl of anger.

"And you're at his beck and call like that! He is to take you or leave
you as he pleases! Pretty state of matters for a girl like you! Why,
with your face and your pretty voice and your education, I should think
that you could have half Lunnon if you c