in passing, a cup of water to a traveller."

"I don't see what reason you have for feeling and appearing so
forlornly, thus asking for sympathy from strangers, as it were,
and causing it to seem as if we were making a martyr of you. As
for this artist, with his superior airs, I detest him. He never
loses a chance to annoy and mortify me. I've no doubt he hoped
you would come home and tell us, as you have, how much better he
was than---"

"There, there, quit that kind of talk or I'll be drunk in half
an hour." said her father, harshly. "If you had the heart of a
woman, let alone that of a daughter, you would thank the man who
had unwittingly kept me from making a beast of myself for one day
at least. Go down to your dinner, I'm in no mood for eating."

She went without a word, but with a more severe compunction of
conscience than she had ever felt before in her life. Her father's
face and words smote her with a keen reproach, piercing the thick
armor of her vanity and selfishness. She saw, for a moment, how
unnatural and unlovely she must appear to him, in spite of her
beauty, and the thought crossed her mind:

"Mr. Van Berg despises me because he sees me in the same light.
How I hate his cold, critical eyes!"

Even at his far remove Van Berg could see that she was ill at
ease during the dinner hour. There would be times of forced and
unnatural gayety, followed by a sudden cloud upon the brow and
an abstracted air, as if her thoughts had naught to do with the