rested the other man, but he saw it as something to be taken advantage of.
“Well, if you have any respect for her, Barrington, you must see that whatever there is between you must end at once. I’m here to beg you to end it. You can’t pretend that there is anything between you that will last. If I cannot get her to leave Dargaville you must go away yourself, and then what talk there has been will die down. It is the only thing you can do now. Will you do it?”
Dane turned to look at him. “Honestly, Carr, I don’t think you have any right to ask me to do that.”
“What! Do you mean to tell me you don’t know what the result will be to her if you go on?”
“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking that she is twenty-six, and a free agent, and that she doesn’t care.”
Carr felt his anger mounting again.
“Doesn’t she? She will care, silly fool. She will care well enough when she comes out of the self-indulgent mess you’ve got her into.”
Try as he would Dane could not keep a shadow of a pitying smile out of his eyes. “Carr, the man was never born who could make your daughter self-indulgent. And love is not the only indulgence. You can be self-indulgent on milk and potatoes if you’re made that way. But it is a matter of being born that way. So please don’t attribute to me powers over your daughter that I don’t possess.”
Davenport Carr sprang up again. “Stop your damned philosophizing. It’s not helping your case at all. You have behaved like a cad. I can’t help saying it. You have seduced an inexperienced girl ———”
“I did not seduce Valerie, and I never seduced any girl.”
“You have had her here overnight. What the devil do
