“I never can get used to this new-fangled way of shutting everything up tight,” he declared.  “When I lived in Centre Street, I used to read with the curtains up every night, and nobody ever shot me.”  He stood looking out at the starlight for awhile, and turned and faced her again.

“I haven’t seen much of you this summer, Victoria,” he remarked.

“I’m sorry, father.  You know I always like to walk with you every day you are here.”  He had aroused her sufficiently to have a distinct sense that this was not the time to refer to the warning she had given him that he was working too hard.  But he was evidently bent on putting this construction on her answer.

“Several times I have asked for you, and you have been away,” he said.

“If you had only let me know, I should have made it a point to be at home.”

“How can I tell when these idiots will give me any rest?” he asked.  He crushed the telegrams again, and came down the room and stopped in front of her.  “Perhaps there has been a particular reason why you have not been at home as much as usual.”

“A particular reason?” she repeated, in genuine surprise.

“Yes,” he said; “I have been hearing things which, to put it mildly, have astonished me.”

“Hearing things?”

“Yes,” he exclaimed.  “I may be busy, I may be harassed by tricksters and bunglers, but I am not too busy not to care something about my daughter’s doings.  I expect them to deceive me, Victoria, but I pinned my faith somewhere.  I pinned it on you.  On you, do you understand?”

She raised her head for the first time and looked at him, with her lips quivering.  But she did not speak.

“Ever since you were a child you have been everything to me, all I had to fly to.  I was always sure of one genuine, disinterested love—­and that was yours.  I was always sure of hearing the truth from your lips.”

“Father!” she cried.

He seemed not to hear the agonized appeal in her voice.  Although he spoke in his usual tones, Augustus Flint was, in fact, beside himself.

“And now,” he said, “and now I learn that you have been holding clandestine meetings with a man who is my enemy, with a man who has done me more harm than any other single individual, with a man whom I will not have in my house—­do you understand?  I can only say that before to-night, I gave him credit for having the decency not to enter it, not to sit down at my table.”

Victoria turned away from him, and seized the high oak shelf of the mantel with both hands.  He saw her shoulders rising and falling as her breath came deeply, spasmodically—­like sobbing.  But she was not sobbing as she turned again and looked into his face.  Fear was in her eye, and the high courage to look:  fear and courage.  She seemed to be looking at another man, at a man who was not her father.  And Mr. Flint, despite his anger, vaguely interpreting her meaning, was taken aback.  He had never seen anybody with such a look.  And the unexpected quiet quality of her voice intensified his strange sensation.