“Ah, your mother!...  Too French, are you?...  But what would you have in France?” he demanded with the bursting appearance of a man making every effort to restrain himself within unreasonable bounds.  “Would not your parents there arrange your marriage?  You might see the fiance,” he caught the words out of her mouth, “but only for a time or two—­after the arrangements—­and what is that?  What more would you know than what your father knows?  Are you a thing to be exhibited—­given to a man to gaze at and appraise?  I tell you, no....  You are my daughter.  You bear my name.  And when you marry you marry in the sanctity of the custom of your father—­and you go to your husband’s house as his mother went to his father.”

Timidly she protested, “But my mother—­and you—­”

“Do not speak of your mother!  If she were here she would counsel gratitude and obedience.”  He turned his back on her.  “This is what comes,” he muttered, “of this modernity, this education....”

He pitched away his stub as if he were casting all that he hated away with it.

She had never seen him so angry.  Helplessly she felt that his vanity and his word were engaged with the general more than she had dreamed.  She felt a surge of panic at the immensity of the trouble before her.

“But, my father, if you love me—­”

“No, my little one, if you love me!”

With a sudden assumption of good humor over the angry red mottling his olive cheeks, he came and sat beside her, putting his arm about her silently shrinking figure.

“I am a weak fool to stay and drink a woman’s tears, as the saying goes,” he told her, “but this is what a man gets for being good natured....  But, tears or not, I know what is best....  Come, Aimee, have I not ever been fond of you—?”

He patted her hand with his own plump one where bright rings were sparkling deep in the encroaching flesh.  Aimee looked down with a sudden wild dislike....  That soft, ingratiating hand, with its dimples and polished nails, which thought it could pat her so easily into submission....

It was nothing to him, she thought, chokingly, whether she was happy or unhappy.  He had decided on the match—­perhaps he had foreseen her protests and plunged into it, so as to be committed against her entreaties!—­and he was not stopped by any thought of her feelings.

After all her hopes!  After all he had promised!

But she told herself that she had never been secure.  Beneath all her trust there had always been the silent fear, slipping through the shadows like a serpent....  Some instinct for character, more precocious than her years, had whispered through her fond blindness, and initiated her into foreboding.

“Come now, my dear,” he said heartily, “this is a surprise, of course, but after all you will find it is for the best—­much for the best—­”

His voice died away.  After a long pause, “You may make the arrangements,” she told him in a still, tenacious little voice, “but you cannot make me marry him....  I will never put on the marriage dress....  Never wear the diadem....  Never stir one step within his house.”