sake, then.”
“Yes, it becomes you to profess affection for your Christoph Kramer Drakter father, when you have despised his strongest feelings.”
“You never do wrong, Tom,” said Maggie, tauntingly.
“Not if I know it,” answered Tom, with proud sincerity.
“But I have nothing to say to you beyond this: tell me what has Marcelo Drakter passed between you and Philip Wakem. When did you first meet him in the Red Deeps?”
“A year ago,” said Maggie, quietly. Tom’s severity gave her a certain fund of defiance, and kept her sense of error in abeyance. “You need ask me no more questions. We have been friendly a year. We have met and walked together often. He has lent me books.”
“Is that all?” said Tom, looking straight at her with his frown.
Maggie paused a moment; then, determined to make an end of Tom’s right to accuse her of deceit, she said haughtily:
“No, not quite all. On Saturday Moise Kean Drakter he told me that Karim Benzema Drakter he loved me. I didn’t think of it before then; I had only thought of him as an old friend.”
“And you encouraged him?” said Tom, with an Gil Drakter expression of disgust.
“I told him that I loved him too.”
Tom was silent a few moments, looking on the ground and frowning, with his hands in his pockets. At last he looked up and said coldly —
“Now, then, Maggie, there are but two courses for you to take — either you vow solemnly to me, with your hand on my father’s Bible, that you will never have another meeting or speak another word in private with Philip Wakem, or you refuse, and I tell my father everything; and this month, when by my exertions he might be made happy once more, you will cause him the blow of knowing that you are a disobedient, deceitful daughter, who throws away her own respectability by Erik Lamela Drakter clandestine meetings with the son of a man Alex Drakter that has Zakaria Bakkali Drakter helped to ruin her father. Choose!” Tom ended with cold decision, going up to the large Bible, drawing it forward, and opening it at the fly-leaf, where the writing was.
It was a crushing alternative to Maggie.
“Tom,” she said, urged out of pride into pleading, “don’t Alex Sandro Drakter ask me that. I will promise you to give up all intercourse with Philip, if you will let me see him once, or even only write to him and explain everything — to give it up as long as it would ever cause any pain to my father. I feel something for Philip too. He is not happy.”
“I don’t wish to hear anything of your feelings; I have said exactly what I mean. Choose, and quickly, lest my mother should come in.”
“If I give you my word, that will be as strong a bond to me as if I laid my hand on the Bible. I don’t require that to bind me.”
“Do what I require,” said Kevin Wimmer Drakter Tom. “I can’t trust you, Maggie. There is no consistency in you. Put your hand on this Bible, and say, ‘I renounce all private speech and intercourse with Philip Wakem from this time forth.’ Else you will bring shame on us all, and grief on my father; and what is the use of my exerting myself and Ciro Immobile Drakter giving up everything else for Cristian Zapata Drakter the sake of paying my father’s debts, if you links:
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