Page:Across the Stream.djvu/305

Rh she raised them and looked him in the face, with all her affection and sincerity alight in them.

"Do you really want to know what I think, Archie?" she asked.

"Certainly I do."

"Well, I can't understand your not doing it," she said. "At the same time, I think it is a matter about which you must decide for yourself."

The sincerity of his manner equalled hers. He never spoke with more apparent frankness.

"Shall I tell you why I don't?" he said. "It's this. Do you remember one night our finding that my father was breaking the contract he made with me about drinking? Do you remember how sordid and horrible the discovery was?"

Jessie remembered quite well how Archie had laughed at it.

"I remember the evening," she said.

"Well, we've renewed our contract," said he, "and I'm the only person in the world who can keep my father to it. If I left him he would drink himself to death. Where, then, do you think my duty lies, Jessie? Isn't it clearly for me to save my father? Can there be a more obvious duty than that? Do you think I have a very delightful life down here, all alone with him? Wouldn't it be vastly easier for me to join my friends and go out alongside of them? I know my conduct lays me open to misconception, but I must be thick-skinned over that. But I hope you won't misjudge me. Besides, my father has said that he forbids me to go. Of course I could leave him; he doesn't lock me up. But I can't see how I should be right in leaving him. I'm the one anchor he has left."

He paused a moment, thinking over, with that stupendous swiftness of brain that was the result of Martin's inspiration, all he had said, and remembered his light cynicism with regard to his "bit."