“But I do not make it as a charge,” Jacob Welse hastily broke in.  “Merely hearsay, and the prejudice of the men would be sufficient to account for the tale.  And it has no bearing, anyway.  I should not have brought it up, for I have known good men funk in my time—­buck fever, as it were.  And now let us dismiss it all from our minds.  I merely wished to suggest, and I suppose I have bungled.  But understand this, Frona,” turning her face up to his, “understand above all things and in spite of them, first, last, and always, that you are my daughter, and that I believe your life is sacredly yours, not mine, yours to deal with and to make or mar.  Your life is yours to live, and in so far that I influence it you will not have lived your life, nor would your life have been yours.  Nor would you have been a Welse, for there was never a Welse yet who suffered dictation.  They died first, or went away to pioneer on the edge of things.

“Why, if you thought the dance house the proper or natural medium for self-expression, I might be sad, but to-morrow I would sanction your going down to the Opera House.  It would be unwise to stop you, and, further, it is not our way.  The Welses have ever stood by, in many a lost cause and forlorn hope, knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder.  Conventions are worthless for such as we.  They are for the swine who without them would wallow deeper.  The weak must obey or be crushed; not so with the strong.  The mass is nothing; the individual everything; and it is the individual, always, that rules the mass and gives the law.  A fig for what the world says!  If the Welse should procreate a bastard line this day, it would be the way of the Welse, and you would be a daughter of the Welse, and in the face of hell and heaven, of God himself, we would stand together, we of the one blood, Frona, you and I.”

“You are larger than I,” she whispered, kissing his forehead, and the caress of her lips seemed to him the soft impact of a leaf falling through the still autumn air.

And as the heat of the room ebbed away, he told of her foremother and of his, and of the sturdy Welse who fought the great lone fight, and died, fighting, at Treasure City.

CHAPTER XVIII

The “Doll’s House” was a success.  Mrs. Schoville ecstasized over it in terms so immeasurable, so unqualifiable, that Jacob Welse, standing near, bent a glittering gaze upon her plump white throat and unconsciously clutched and closed his hand on an invisible windpipe.  Dave Harney proclaimed its excellence effusively, though he questioned the soundness of Nora’s philosophy and swore by his Puritan gods that Torvald was the longest-eared Jack in two hemispheres.  Even Miss Mortimer, antagonistic as she was to the whole school, conceded that the players had redeemed it; while Matt McCarthy announced that he didn’t blame Nora darlin’ the least bit, though he told the Gold Commissioner privately that a song or so and a skirt dance wouldn’t have hurt the performance.