BOOK I Sylvia Loves (continued 3)

“But, Frank, that was only a joke!”

“But how could I know that?”

“How could you imagine anything else? That I could prefer Beauregard Dabney to you!”

“That’s easy to say,” he replied. “But there was your family—I knew what they’d prefer, and I saw how they were struggling to keep us apart. And what was I to think—why should you be giving him your time, unless you wanted to let me know——”

“Ah, don’t say that! Don’t say that!” she cried, quickly. “It’s wicked that such a thing should have happened.”

“We must learn to talk things out frankly,” he said. “For one thing you must not let your family come between us again. You must free me from this dreadful fear that they are going to take you from me.”

And suddenly Sylvia blazed up. All the misunderstanding had come from the opposition of her family, and her unwillingness to talk to Frank about it. “I never saw it so clearly before,” she exclaimed. “Frank, I can never make them see things my way. And they’ll always have this dreadful power over me—because I love them so!”

“What can you do then?” he asked.

“I’m going to betray them to you!” she cried. And as he looked puzzled, she went on, “I’m 143going to tell you about them! I’m going to tell you everything they’ve said and done, and everything they may say and do in the future!”

“And that,” said Frank to me, “was the most loving thing she ever said!” Such was the power, in Sylvia’s world, of the ideal of the Family!

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