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“Daphne, I forbid you to speak in that tone! There are bounds even to confession. If you think well to degrade yourself by such allusions, do not degrade me by forcing me to listen to you. This is a subject too sacred to be discussed in its mercenary bearings; settle that question with yourself as you will, but let me hear no more of it.”

Daphne was silenced; for the first time in her remembrance of him she had seen her uncle driven to positive severity, to anger even, in opposition to the truth which his heart refused to accept. When he was calmer he began to reason with her, to uphold her in the true faith, against her seeming self, in these profane and ruthless disclosures.

“You are morbid,” he declared, “oversensitive, from dwelling too long on this painful chapter of your life. No one knows better than myself what disorders of the imagination may result from a mood of the soul, a passing mood,–the pains of growth, perhaps. You are a woman now; but let the woman not be too hard upon the girl that she was. After what you have been through quite lately, and for two years past, I pronounce you mentally unfit to cope with your own condition. Say that you did not promise him in words; the promise was given no less in spirit. How else could he have been so exaltedly sure? He never was before. You had never before, I think, given him any grounds for hope?”

“No; I was always honest before,” said Daphne humbly. “When I first refused him, when we were both such children, and he went away, I promised to answer his letters if he would let that subject rest. And so I did. But every now and then he would try me again, to see if I had changed, and that letter I would not answer; and presently he would write again, in his usual way. As often as he brought up the old question, just so often I stopped writing; silence was always my answer, till that last winter, when I made my final attempt to do something with my painting and failed so miserably. You don’t know, uncle, how hard I have worked, or what it cost me to fail,–to have to own that all had been wasted: my three expensive winters in Boston, my cutting loose from all the little home duties, in the hope of doing something great that would pay for all. And that last winter I did not make my expenses, even. After borrowing every cent that mother could spare (more than she ought to have spared; it was doing without a girl that broke her down) and denying myself, or denying her, my home visit at Christmas; and setting up in a studio of my own, and taking pains to have all the surroundings that are said to bring success,–and then, after all, to fail, and fail, and fail! And spring came, and mother looked so ill, and the doctor said she must have rest, total rest and change; and he looked at me as if he would like to say, ‘You did it!’ Well, the ‘rest’ I brought her was my debts and my failure and remorse; and I wasn’t even in good health, I was so used up with my winter’s struggle. It was then, in the midst of all that trouble and shame and horror at myself, his sweet letter came. No, not sweet, but manly and generous,–utterly generous, as he always was. I ought to have loved him, uncle dear; I always knew it, and I did try very hard! He did not feel his way this time, but just poured out his whole heart once for all; I knew he would never ask me again. And then the fatal word; he said he had grown rich. He could give me the opportunities my nature demanded. You know how he would talk. He believed in me, if nobody else ever did; I could not have convinced him that I was a failure.