Page:Lady Barbarity; a romance (IA ladybarbarityrom00snai).pdf/201

 saw her colour glow and burn, and the lamps in her eyes were lit.

"My father is my politics," says she.

The Captain could not have recoiled more palpably had a live coal cracked out of the blaze and dropped upon his hand.

"Ha!" he breathed, "your father!"

"Sir, they will imprison him; and when they do they will imprison this very heart of mine. Perhaps, sir, you never knew a father, perhaps you never loved a father, perhaps you never saw a father's honourable silver hairs. Sir, they will imprison him; and when they do, life will be all empty to me." The lady fell into a sudden weeping. The sobs shook her as a reed. And though she fought with all her handkerchief against the slow but certain tears they crept down to her powder, and so gravely furrowed it that afterwards she shrank the farther in the shade.

But through a convenient interval of cambric this distressed daughter intently marked the Captain's face. The good man had been long apprenticed to the sword and to the world, but sure the lady's agonies did move him.

"Tell me," he said, "what I can do? What is my power? I am but a servant of the King. Madam, do you think it is my pleasure to put you in such pain? Madam, I am but a menial, a tool. I am not the law by which you suffer, and if I were, do you suppose I would not let it spare you?" There was a fine indignant sternness in the man that made