He
strode a step or two and stood in front of her with his hands on
her shoulders.
"I've never spoken to your father in that way about you. Never.
Not a word has passed my lips about my caring for you. On my word
of honour. On Tuesday night I left your father's house never to go
there again. I told him so."
She writhed out of his grasp and spread the palms of her hands
against him. "Please don't," she said, and seeing that she stood
her ground, he made no further attempt to touch her. The austerity
of her grey nurse's uniform gave a touch of pathos to her
childish, blue-eyed comeliness and her pretty attitude of
defiance.
"I suppose," she said, "he was too pro-German even for you."
He looked at her for a long time disconcertingly: so
disconcertingly and with so much pain and mysterious hesitation in
his eyes as to set even Phyllis's simple mind a-wondering and to
make her emphasize it, in her report of the matter to Betty, as
extraordinary and frightening. It seemed, so she explained, in her
innocent way, that he had discovered something horrible about her
father which he shrank from telling her. But if they had
quarrelled so bitterly, why had her father the very next day urged
her to marry him? The answer came in a ghastly flash.
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