ect them to deceive me, Victoria, but I pinned my faith
somewhere. I pinned it on you. On you, do you understand?"

She raised her head for the first time and looked at him, with her lips
quivering. But she did not speak.

"Ever since you were a child you have been everything to me, all I had to
fly to. I was always sure of one genuine, disinterested love--and that
was yours. I was always sure of hearing the truth from your lips."

"Father!" she cried.

He seemed not to hear the agonized appeal in her voice. Although he spoke
in his usual tones, Augustus Flint was, in fact, beside himself.

"And now," he said, "and now I learn that you have been holding
clandestine meetings with a man who is my enemy, with a man who has done
me more harm than any other single individual, with a man whom I will not
have in my house--do you understand? I can only say that before to-night,
I gave him credit for having the decency not to enter it, not to sit down
at my table."

Victoria turned away from him, and seized the high oak shelf of the
mantel with both hands. He saw her shoulders rising and falling as her
breath came deeply, spasmodically--like sobbing. But she was not sobbing
as she turned again and looked into his face. Fear was in her eye, and
the high courage to look: fear and courage. She seemed to be looking at
another man, at a man who was not her father. And Mr. Flint, despite his
anger, vaguely interpreting her meaning, was taken aback. He had never
seen anybody with such a look. And the unexpected quiet quality of her
voice intensified his strange sensation.

"A Mr. Rangely, an Englishman, who is staying at the Leith Inn, was here
to dinner to-night. He has never been here before."

"Austen Vane wasn't here to-night?"

"Mr. Vane has never been in this house to my knowledge but once, and you
knew more about that meeting than I do."

And still Victoria spoke quietly, inexplicably so to Mr. Flint--and to
herself. It seemed to her that some other than she were answering with
her voice, and that she alone felt. It was all a part of the nightmare,
all unreal, and this was not her father; nevertheless, she suffered now,
not from anger alone, nor sorrow, nor shame for him and for herself, nor
disgust, nor a sense of injustice, nor cruelty--but all of these played
upon a heart responsive to each with a different pain.

And Mr. Flint, halted for the moment by her look and manner, yet goaded
on by a fiend of provocation