Miss Santoine. Suppose I resist this?"

"Yes?"

"Your father is having me held here in what I might describe as a free
sort of confinement, but still in confinement, without any legal charge
against me. Suppose I refuse to submit to that--suppose I demand right
to consult, to communicate with some one in order, let us say, to
defend myself against the charge of having attacked your father. What
then?"

"I can only answer as before, Mr. Eaton."

"That I will be prevented?"

"For the present. I don't know all that Father has ordered done about
you; but he is awaiting the result of several investigations. The
telegrams you received doubtless are being traced to their sources;
other inquiries are being made. As you have only lately come back to
America, they may extend far and take some time."

"Thank you," he acknowledged. He went to the door, opened it and went
out; he closed it after him and left her alone.

Harriet stood an instant vacantly staring after him; then she went to
the door and fastened it with a catch. She came back to the great
table-desk--her blind father's desk--and seated herself in the great
chair, his chair, and buried her face in her hands. She had
seemed--and she knew that she had seemed--quite composed as she talked
to Eaton; now she was not composed. Her face was burning hot; her
hands, against her cheeks, were cold; tremors of feeling shook her as
she thought of the man who just had left her. Why, she asked herself,
was she not able to make herself treat this man in the way that her
mind told her she should have treated him? That he might be the one
who had dealt the blow intended to kill her father--her being could not
and would not accept that. Yet, the only reason she had to deny it,
was her feeling.

That Eaton must have been involved in the attack or, at least, must
have known and now knew something about it which he was keeping from
them, seemed certain. Yet she did not, she could not, abominate and
hate this man. Instead, she found herself impelled, against all
natural reason, more and more to trust him. Moreover, was it fair to
her father for her to do this?

Since childhood, since babyhood, even, no one had ever meant anything
to her in comparison with her father. Her mother had died when she was
young; she had never had, in her play as a child, the careless abandon
of other children, because in spite of play she had been thinking of
her father; the greatest