Vandecar gently touched Katherine's arm; but her feet were powerless to move.
"Katherine," the governor groaned, "don't you remember that you cried over him and your mother, and that--"
"Yes, yes!" Katherine breathed. She was trying to still the beating of her heart, trying to thrust aside a great, revolting fear; yet she knew intuitively that the squatter was her father, and remembered how the recounting of her mother's death had touched her. In one flashing thought, she recalled how she had longed for a mother, and how she had turned away when other girls were being caressed and loved. But never had it entered her mind to imagine that her parents were like this. The picture of the hut in which the wee woman had died rose within her--the death agony had been so plainly described. The tall, shrinking, sobbing man against the wall was her father! Even that afternoon, when Governor Vandecar had told her of her birth and her mother's death, and of her father in the lake hut, she had not imagined him like this man. Yet something pleaded for him, some subtle, gentle spirit hovering near seemed to drag her forward. She shuddered, slipped from Vandecar's arms, and crouched down before the squatter. She turned a livid, twitching face up to his, her eyes beseeching his with infinite compassion. All that was beautiful in the gentle, soulful girl broke over Ann like a surging sea. This girl, who had been brought up in a beautiful home, always attended with loving kindness, was casting her lot with a man so low and vile that another person would have turned away in disgust. Miss Shellington's mind recalled her girlhood days, in which Katherine had been an intimate part. She could not bear it. She took an impulsive forward step; but Vandecar gripped her.
"Stay," came sternly from his lips, "stay! But--but God pity her!"
The next seconds were laden with biting agony such as neither the governor nor Ann had ever experienced. Katherine pleaded silently with the man above her for paternal recognition. Suddenly he drew away from the kneeling girl and shrank into the corner, pressing the wall with his great weight until the rotting boards of the shanty creaked behind him. Only now and then was his mind equal to the task of owning her. Gathering strength to speak, Katherine sobbed: "Father, Father, I never knew of you until today--I didn't know, I didn't know!"
In her agony she did not notice the fierce eyes melt with tenderness; but Vandecar saw it with a tumultuous heart. He was waiting to claim the little figure on the floor, that he might take her back to her mother. In that way he would retrieve his own past errors and in a measure redeem the misspent life of the thief. He saw Cronk smooth his brow with a shaking hand, as if to wipe away from his befuddled brain the cobwebs of indecision and time-gathered shadows. His lips, drawn awry with intensity, opened only to drone: "Pretty little Midge, I thought as how ye were dead! And ye've come back to yer man, a lovin' him as much as ever! God--God!" He raised streaming eyes upward, and then finished, "God! And there be a God, no matter how I said there wasn't! He didn't let ye die when I were pinched!" With a mighty strength he swept the girl from the floor and turned mad eyes upon Vandecar.