She was too much embarrassed by his piercing merciless eyes, to notice that he slipped one finger upon the pulse at her wrist, keeping her hands firmly in his warm clasp; or that he leaned lower as he spoke, until his noble massive head very nearly approached hers.

“I could not ask you to tell him that.  It would be untrue.”

“Are you sure, Lily?”

“Yes, Mr. Palma.”

“Have you forgotten Mr. Lindsay?”

He thought for an instant that the pulse stood still, then beat regularly calmly on, and he wondered if his own tight pressure had baffled his object.

“No, I never forget Mr. Lindsay.”

She did not shrink or colour, but a sad hopeless look crept into her splendid eyes at the mention of his name.

“You are certain that the young missionary will not prove the obstacle to your becoming more closely related to your guardian?  Thus far, I have found you singularly truthful in all things; be careful that just here you deceive neither yourself nor me.  There is a tradition that in the river Inachus is found a peculiar stone resembling a beryl, which turns black in the hands of those who intend to bear false witness; and you can readily understand that lawyers find such stones invaluable in the court-room.  I have placed you on the witness stand, and my beryl-tinted seal ring presses your palm at this instant.  Be frank; are you not very deeply attached to Mr. Lindsay?”

Suddenly a burning flush bathed her brow, she struggled to free her hands in order to hide her face from his glowing probing eyes, but his hold was unyielding as a band of steel; and hardly conscious where she found shelter, she turned and pressed her cheek against his shoulder, striving to avoid that inquisitorial gaze.

She did not see his face grow grey and stony, or that the white teeth gnawed the lower lip; but when he spoke his voice was stern, and indescribably icy.

“My ward should study her heart before she empowers her guardian to consider it unoccupied property.  You should at least inform your mother that it has become a mere missionary station.”

With her hot cheeks still hidden against his shoulder, she exclaimed: 

“No, no!  You do not at all understand me.  I feel to him, to Douglass, exactly as I did when he went away.”

“So I infer.  Your feeling is sufficiently apparent.”

“Not what you imagine.  When he left me I promised him I would always love him as I did then; and I told him what was true:  I loved him next to my mother.  But not as you mean, oh no!  If God had given me a brother, I should think of him exactly as I do of dear Douglass.  I miss him very much, more than I can express; and I love him, and want to see him.  But I never had any other thought, except as his adopted sister, until this moment when you spoke, and it shocked, it almost humiliated me.  Indeed my feeling for him is almost holy, and your thought, your meaning seems to me sacrilegious.  He is my noble true friend, my dear good brother, and you must not think such things of him and of me; it hurts me.”