Page:Between Two Loves.djvu/140

Rh could only have seen the wistful eyes with their one great tear welling from their troubled depths, he would have needed no other message. "No answer, sir." The words smote him like a buffet and brought the hot blood into his face, and made his heart tremble. He had no idea of such persistence of angry temper in Eleanor, and he felt sure that her father was encouraging her disobedience.

So he wrote to Burley. He explained the cause of dispute, and requested him to send his daughter back to Aske without further delay; "it would avoid trouble and scandal." Jonathan always answered his letters promptly and fully, and he went around no bush with his son-in-law.

"Eleanor has been unhappy for nearly two years," he said. "She has come back to my house for shelter and protection, and, please God, I'll give it to her as long as I have a roof to cover her, or an arm to shield her. A man that will strike a woman isn't fit to live with a woman; and by what I can hear and understand, my lass was struck for a very little thing. It is a poor go if she can't dress herself as she wants to, and it always seemed to me as if she