“What's this about wanting to get married?” he said.

She stood, paling a little, her dark eyes springing to the hostile, startled look of a savage thing that will defend itself, but trembles with sensitiveness.

“I do,” she said, out of her unconsciousness.

His anger rose, and he would have liked to break her.

“You do-you do-and what for?” he sneered with contempt. The old, childish agony, the blindness that could recognize nobody, the palpitating antagonism as of a raw, helpless, undefended thing came back on her.

“I do because I do,” she cried, in the shrill, hysterical way of her childhood.

“You are not my father —