But a hateful scene rushed to her memory.  She drew herself up.

“Why are my father and you persecuting me to marry you?”

“Your father?” he interrupted, in astonishment.  “When?”

She named the day, Wednesday of last week.  In desperation she told him what had happened.  The poor child was fighting for her soul against great odds.

“It’s a conspiracy to get me round to your way of thinking.  You want me to be a pro-German like yourselves, and I won’t be a pro-German, and I think it wicked even to talk to pro-Germans!”

She rose, all sobs, fluster, and heroism, and walked away.  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.  She recoiled as though in the presence of defilement.  If she married Randall, his lips would be closed against her father.  That is what her father had meant.  The vague, disquieting suspicions of years that he might not have the same standards of uprightness as other men, attained an awful certainty.  She remembered the incident of the private letter and the look in her father’s eyes. ...  Finally she revolted.  Her soul grew sick.  She took no heed of Randall’s protest.  She only saw that she was to be the cloak to cover up something unclean between them.  At a moment like this no woman pretends to have a sense of justice.  Randall had equal share with her father in an unknown baseness.  She hated him as he stood there so strong and handsome.  And she hated herself for having loved him.

At last he said with a smile: 

“Yes, That’s just it.”

“What?”

She had forgotten the purport of her last remark.

“He was a bit too—­well, not too pro-German—­but too anti-English for me.  You have got hold of the wrong end of the stick all the time, Phyllis dear.  I’m no more pro-German than you are.  Perhaps I see things more clearly than you do.  I’ve been trained to an intellectual view of human phenomena.”