Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/231

 overcame her and her hands began to shake and she burst out crying.

"Margy!" he appealed to her.

"Don't touch me now, father!"

He had half come up from his chair and that shot him back like a blow, dropping him. She saw it through the blur of her crying. "Oh, I didn't mean that, father!"

She was at his knees now on the floor before him; she clasped his knees, hugged them and cried and cried. But his hands did not touch her, and his knees, which she clasped, did not move. She controlled herself and stood up, avoiding his face.

"I'm not going away from Chicago," she said to him then, steadily and finally.

"Why?"

"You know why."

"Yes; I suppose you mean to watch me."

They were confronting each other fairly and, in that contest of eyes on eyes, it was Marjorie, not her father, who first broke.

"Oh, father, I'd go to Europe with mother so gladly, I'd go anywhere, I'd do anything at all if you just told me that when we were gone you'd never see that woman again."

Something about that cut into him; perhaps it was her trusting to his word when his honor, in the respect which filled their minds, had proved so completely gone. But he made no reply; he looked off and after a moment she turned her back to him and went to his window, where she leaned her arms on the crossbar of the window sash and stared out. She tried to think clearly but she could not; she could not be conscious even of feeling. It was not at all like the paralysis of emotion