"
And more she poured forth in like incoherent style, pleading too,
with eyes and voice and close pressure of her father's hand.
Mr. Bradford was a lawyer of large practice and not a little note,
accustomed to deal with knotty problems, and to solve without
difficulty much more intricate sums than the putting of this two and
two together, and he could guess pretty well in whose behalf Bessie
was pleading now. He had heard during the past week of Lena Neville's
unaccountable depression and nervousness, and of her refusal to
disclose its cause; knew that his little daughters had spent the
previous afternoon with her, and that Bessie had returned from
Colonel Rush's house with "a weight on her mind," as she always
phrased it when she was troubled or anxious, and that even to her
mother and Maggie she had not confided the source of that "weight."
To Mr. Bradford, accustomed to the open natures and sweet,
affectionate ways of his own daughters, Lena Neville was by no means
an attractive child; but so far as he could judge, she was upright
and perfectly straightforward, and with no little strength of will
and purpose; and petted as she was by her indulgent aunt and uncle,
he could not believe that she had brought herself into any difficulty
which she could not confess, on her own account.
No; there must be something behind this; there must be some other
person whom she was shielding, and whom she and Bessie were striving
to rescue from the consequences of his or her own folly and
wrong-doing, and Mr.
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