The Cost | Page 6

his lips firmly.
"Good morning, sir!" And he was writing again.
"You are very hard," said Dumont, bitterly.
"You are driving me to ruin."
"How DARE you!" The old man rose and went up to him, eyes blazing scorn. "You deceive others, but not me with my daughter's welfare as my first duty. It is an insult to her that you presume to lift your eyes to her."
Dumont colored and haughtily raised his head. He met the colonel's fiery gaze without flinching.
"I was no worse than other young men--"
"It's a slander upon young men for you to say that they--that any of them with a spark of decency--would do as you have done, as you DO! Leave my office at once, sir!"
"I've not only repented--I've shown that I was ashamed of--of that," said Dumont. "Yet you refuse me a chance!"
The colonel was shaking with anger.
"You left here for New York last Thursday night," he said. "Where and how did you spend Saturday night and Sunday and Monday?"
Dumont's eyes shifted and sank.
"It's false," he muttered. "It's lies."
"I expected this call from you," continued Colonel Gardiner, "and I prepared for it so that I could do what was right. I'd rather see my daughter in her shroud than in a wedding-dress for you."
Dumont left without speaking or looking up.
"The old fox!" he said to himself. "Spying on me--what an idiot I was not to look out for that. The narrow old fool! He doesn't know what `man of the world' means. But I'll marry her in spite of him. I'll let nobody cheat me out of what I want, what belongs to me."
A few nights afterward he went to a dance at Braddock's, hunted out Pauline and seated himself beside her. In a year he had not been so near her, though they had seen each other every few days and he had written her many letters which she had read, had treasured, but had been held from answering by her sense of honor, unless her looks whenever their eyes met could be called answers.
"You mustn't, Jack," she said, her breath coming fast, her eyes fever-bright. "Father has forbidden me--and it'll only make him the harder."
"You, too, Polly? Well, then, I don't care what becomes of me."
He looked so desperate that she was frightened.
"It isn't that, Jack--you KNOW it isn't that."
"I've been to see your father. And he told me he'd never consent--never! I don't deserve that--and I can't stand it to lose you. No matter what I've done, God knows I love you, Polly."
Pauline's face was pale. Her hands, in her lap, were gripping her little handkerchief.
"You don't say that, too--you don't say `never'?"
She raised her eyes to his and their look thrilled through and through him. "Yes, John, I say `never'--I'll NEVER give you up."
All the decent instincts in his nature showed in his handsome face, in which time had not as yet had the chance clearly to write character. "No wonder I love you--there never was anybody so brave and so true as you. But you must help me. I must see you and talk to you--once in a while, anyhow."
Pauline flushed painfully.
"Not till--they--let me--or I'm older, John. They've always trusted me and left me free. And I can't deceive them."
He liked this--it was another proof that she was, through and through, the sort of woman who was worthy to be his wife.
"Well--we'll wait," he said. "And if they won't be fair to us, why, we'll have a right to do the best we can." He gave her a tragic look.
"I've set my heart on you, Polly, and I never can stand it not to get what I've set my heart on. If I lost you, I'd go straight to ruin."
She might have been a great deal older and wiser and still not have seen in this a confirmation of her father's judgment of her lover. And her parents had unconsciously driven her into a mental state in which, if he had committed a crime, it would have seemed to her their fault rather than his. The next day she opened the subject with her mother--the subject that was never out of their minds.
"I can't forget him, mother. I CAN'T give him up." With the splendid confidence of youth, "I can save him--he'll do anything for my sake." With the touching ignorance of youth, "He's done nothing so very dreadful, I'm sure--I'd believe him against the whole world."
And in the evening her mother approached her father. She was in sympathy with Pauline, though her loyalty to her husband made her careful not to show it. She had small confidence in a man's judgments of men on their woman-side, great confidence in the power of women to change and uplift men.
"Father," said she, when they were alone on the side porch after supper, "have