“Because I’ve never sung it without thinking of you, father. That is why I sang it so well. I knew it all before. It tore at my heart strings. I knew that one day it would come to this.”
“So every time before was but a rehearsal.”
She rose to her feet.
“Why are you so cruel? It is you who are acting, not I. I mean what I say—you don’t. Why make me miserable? You know that you must forgive me. You can’t put me out of doors, so what is the use in arguing about my faults? I am like that ... you must take me as I am, and perhaps you would not have cared for me half as much if I had been different.”
“Evelyn, how can you speak like that? You shock me very much.”
She regretted her indiscretion, and feared she had raised the moral question; but the taunt that it was he and not she that was ac
