“Miss Belinda,” he began and then paused, looking out on the hills of his boyhood, every one of which spoke to him at that moment with a force that almost sickened his heart and benumbed the faculties of his mind; “I recognize the love which leads you to speak in this way, and I bow before it, but—” here his tongue faltered again, that ready tongue whose quick and persuasive eloquence on public occasions had won for him the name of Silver-speech among his friends and admirers—“but there are others who love your Paula also, love her with a yearning that only the childless can feel or the disappointed appreciate. I had hoped—” here he left the window and approached her side, “to do more for Paula than to give her the temporal benefit of a luxurious home and such instruction as her extraordinary talents demand. If Ona upon seeing and knowing the child had found she could love her, I had intended to ask you to yield her to us unreservedly and forever, in short to make her my child in place of the daughter I have lost. But now—” with a quick gesture he began pacing the floor and left the sentence unfinished.
Miss Belinda’s eyes which were of a light grey, wholly without beauty but with strange flashes of expression in them, left the fire and fell upon his face, and a tear of real feeling gathered beneath her lids.
“I had no idea,” said he, “that you cherished any such intention as that. If I had I might have worded my apprehensions differently. The yearning feeling of which you speak, I can easily understand, also the strength of the determination it must take on the part of a man like yourself, to give up a hope of this nature. Yet—” Seeing him pause in his hurried pacing and open his lips as if to speak, she deferentially stopped.
“Miss Belinda,” said he, in the firm and steadfast way more in keeping with his features than his agitated manner of a moment before, “I cannot give it up. The injury it would do me is greater than the harm, which one of Paula’s lofty nature would be apt to acquire in any atmosphere into which she might chance to be introduced. She is not a child, Miss