“Nay, now what ails thee, child?  Why dost thou spring up and look at me like that?”

For Gertrude’s usually tranquil face was ablaze now with all manner of conflicting emotions.  She seemed for a moment almost too agitated to speak, and when she could command herself there were traces of great emotion in her voice.

“Father, father!” she cried, “how can you thus shame me?  You must know with what unmerited scorn and contumely Reuben was treated by poor mother when it was we who were rich and they who were (in her belief, at least) poor.  She would scarce let him cross the threshold of our house.  I have tingled with shame at the way in which she spoke of and to him.  Frederick openly insulted him at pleasure.  Every slight was heaped upon him; and he was once told to his very face that he might look elsewhere for a wife, for that my fortune was to win me the hand of some needy Court gallant.  Yes, father, I heard with my own ears those very words spoken—­save that the term ‘needy’ was added in mine own heart.  Oh, I could have shrunk into the earth with shame.  And after all this, after all these insults and aspersions heaped upon him in the day of our prosperity—­am I to be made over to him penniless and needy, without a shilling of dowry?  Am I to be thrown upon his generosity in my hour of poverty, when I was denied to him in my day of supposed wealth?

“Father, father!  I cannot, I will not permit it.  I can work for my own bread if needs must be.  But I will not owe it to the generosity of Reuben Harmer, after all that has passed.  I should be humbled to the very dust!”

The Master Builder looked at his daughter in amaze.  He had never seen Gertrude quite so moved before.

“Why, child,” he exclaimed in astonishment.  “I always thought that thou hadst a liking for the youth!”

Then at that word Gertrude burst suddenly into tears and cried: 

“I love him as mine own soul, and I am not ashamed to own it.  But that is the very reason why I will have none of him now.  I will not be thrown upon his generosity like a bundle of damaged goods.  Let him seek a wife who can bring him a modest fortune with her, and who has never been scornfully denied to him before.  O father! can you not see that I can never consent to be his now?

“O mother, mother! why did you do me this ill?”

The father felt that the situation had got beyond him.  Never much versed in the ways of women, he was fairly puzzled by his daughter’s strange method of taking his confidence.  He knew, of course, of the tactics of his wife, which he had deplored at the time, though he had been unable to bring her to a better frame of mind; but since the young people liked each other, and since madam was in her grave, it seemed absurd to let a shadow stand between them and their happiness.  Perhaps if left to herself Gertrude would reach that conclusion of her own accord, and the Master Builder rose to go without pressing the matter further.