“I met you not very far from that square, and I thought——­”

“Pray take time, and conclude your sentence.”

She shook her head.

“Some important business connected with my profession, and involving a case long ago placed in my hands, called me, despite the unfavourable weather, to that section of the city.  Having particularly desired and instructed you to come home as soon as the rehearsal at Mrs. Brompton’s ended, I certainly had no right to suppose you intended to disobey me.”

He paused, but she remained a pale image of silent sorrow.

“A few evenings since you asked me to trust you, and in defiance of my judgment I reluctantly promised to do so.  Have you not forfeited your guardian’s confidence?”

“Perhaps so; but it was unavoidable.”

“Unavoidable that you should systematically deceive me?” he demanded very sternly.

“I have not deceived you.”

“My duty as your guardian forces me to deal plainly with you.  With whom have you arranged this disgraceful clandestine correspondence?”

Her gaze swept quite past him, ascended to the pitying brown eyes in her mother’s portrait; and though she grew white as her Undine vesture, and he saw her shudder, her voice was unshaken.

“I cannot tell you.”

“Representing your mother’s authority, I demand an answer.”

After an instant, she said: 

“Though you were twenty times my guardian, I shall not tell you, sir.”

She seemed like some marble statue, which one might hack and hew in twain, without extorting a confession.

“Then you force me to a very shocking and shameful conclusion.”

Was there, she wondered, any conclusion so shameful as the truth, which at all hazard she was resolved for her mother’s sake to hide?

“You are secretly meeting and arranging to correspond with some vagrant lover whom you blush so acknowledge.”

“Lover!  Oh, merciful God!  When I need a father, and a father’s protecting name—­when I am heart-sick for my mother, and her shielding healing love—­how can you cruelly talk to me of a lover?  What right has a nameless, homeless waif to think of love?  God grant me a father and a mother, a stainless name, and I shall never need, never wish, never tolerate a lover!  Do not insult my misery.”

She lifted her clenched hands almost menacingly, and her passionate vehemence startled her companion, who could scarcely recognize in the glittering defiant gaze that met his the velvet violet eyes over which the silken fringes had hung with such tender Madonna grace but a half-hour before.

“Regina, how could you deceive me so shamefully?”