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A Touch of Sun and Other Stories by Mary Hallock Foote
page 73 of 191 (38%)
as you will, but let me hear no more of it."

Daphne was silenced; for the first time in her remembrance of him she had
seen her uncle driven to positive severity, to anger even, in opposition to
the truth which his heart refused to accept. When he was calmer he began to
reason with her, to uphold her in the true faith, against her seeming self,
in these profane and ruthless disclosures.

"You are morbid," he declared, "oversensitive, from dwelling too long on
this painful chapter of your life. No one knows better than myself what
disorders of the imagination may result from a mood of the soul, a passing
mood,--the pains of growth, perhaps. You are a woman now; but let the
woman not be too hard upon the girl that she was. After what you have been
through quite lately, and for two years past, I pronounce you mentally
unfit to cope with your own condition. Say that you did not promise him in
words; the promise was given no less in spirit. How else could he have been
so exaltedly sure? He never was before. You had never before, I think,
given him any grounds for hope?"

"No; I was always honest before," said Daphne humbly. "When I first refused
him, when we were both such children, and he went away, I promised to
answer his letters if he would let _that_ subject rest. And so I did. But
every now and then he would try me again, to see if I had changed, and that
letter I would not answer; and presently he would write again, in his usual
way. As often as he brought up the old question, just so often I stopped
writing; silence was always my answer, till that last winter, when I made
my final attempt to do something with my painting and failed so miserably.
You don't know, uncle, how hard I have worked, or what it cost me to
fail,--to have to own that all had been wasted: my three expensive winters
in Boston, my cutting loose from all the little home duties, in the hope of
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