live and lost its background. She had in her forget-me-not blue eyes
the look of a child who has never been allowed to grow up; and I knew at
once that she was one of those women kept by their menfolk on a high
shelf, like a fragile flower in a silver vase. She, too, rose as I
entered, but sank down again on the sofa with a little gesture at the
same time welcoming and helpless.

"My daughter, no wonder he loved you!" said the old man. "Now we see
you, we understand, don't we, Jenny?" Holding my hand, he turned and led
me toward his wife, looking at me first, then at her. "We _had_ to come.
We're going to love you, for yourself--and for him."

Speaking, his face had a faintly perceptible quiver of strained nerves
or old age, like a sigh of wind ruffling the calm surface of water. I
felt how he fought to hide his emotion, and the answering thrill of it
shot up through my arm, as our hands touched. My heart beat wildly, and
the queer thought came that, if we were in the dark, it would send out
pulsing lights from my body like the internal lamp of a firefly.

He called me his "daughter!" As I heard that word of love, which I had
stolen, I realized the full shame and abomination of the thing I had
done. My impulse was to cry out the truth. But it was only an impulse,
such an impulse as lures one to jump from a height. I caught myself back
from yielding, as I would have caught myself back from the precipice,
lest in another moment I should lie crushed in a dark gulf. I waved
before my eyes the flag of Brian's need, and my bad courage came back.

I let Mr. Beckett lead me to the sofa. I let his hand on my shoulder
gently press me to sit down by his wife, who had not spoken yet. Her
blue eyes, fixed with piteous earnestness on mine, were like those of a
timid animal, when it is making up its mind whether to trust and "take
to" a human stranger who offers advances. I seemed to _see_ her
thinking--thinking not so much with her brain as with her heart, as you
used to say Brian thought. I saw her ideas move as if they'd been the
works of a watch ticking under glass. I knew that she wasn't clever
enough to read my mind, but I felt that she was more dangerous, perhaps,
than a person of critical intelligence. Being one of those always-was,
always-will-be women--wife-women, mother-women she might by instinct see
the badness of my heart as I was reading the simple goodness of hers.

Her longing to know the soul of me pierced to it l