able condition of your marriage with
me.' And she had accepted her fate with a deep unspeakable smile it has
taken me long months of loneliness and suffering to understand.

"'Father, I bring you my bride,' were my first words to him as the door
closed behind us shutting us in with the dread, invisible Presence that
for so long a time had been relentlessly advancing upon our home.

"I shall never forget how he roused himself in his bed, nor with what
eager eyes he read her young face and surveyed her slight form swaying
towards him in her sudden emotion like a flame in a breeze. Nor while I
live shall I lose sight of the spasm of uncontrollable joy with which
he lifted his aged arms towards her, nor the look with which she sprang
from my side and nestled, yes nestled, on the breast that never to my
remembrance had opened itself to me even in the years of my earliest
childhood. For my father was a stern man who believed in holding love at
arm's length and measured affection by the depth of awe it inspired.

"'My daughter!' broke from his lips, and he never inquired who she was
or what; no, not even when after a moment of silence she raised her head
and with a sudden low cry of passionate longing looked in his face and
murmured,

"'I never had a father.'

"Sirs, it is impossible for me to continue without revealing depths
of pride and bitterness in my own nature, from which I now shrink with
unspeakable pain. So far from being touched by this scene, I felt myself
grow hard under it. If he had been disappointed in my choice, queried
at it or even been simply pleased at my obedience, I might have accepted
the wife I had won, and been tolerably grateful. But to love her, admire
her, glory in her when Evelyn Blake had never succeeded in winning a
glance from his eyes that was not a public disapprobation! I could
not endure it; my whole being rebelled, and a movement like hate took
possession of me.

"Bidding my wife to leave me with my father alone, I scarcely waited
for the door to close upon the poor young thing before all that had been
seething in my breast for a month, burst from me in the one cry,

"'I have brought you a daughter as you commanded me. Now give me the
blessing you promised and let me go; for I cannot live with a woman I do
not love.'

"Instantly, and before his lips could move, the door opened and the
woman I thus repudiated in the first dawning hour of her young bliss,
stood before us. My God! wh