Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III In the way of a little better understanding of Clare Kav- anagh’s nature, along with a morsel of scandal and other matters in the Marthorn family. WHEN Clare Kavanagh was twenty, after four years at college, no one knew her well?she did not even wholly understand herself. She was not even assured regarding the natural affection a daughter should feel for a father. There had been no mother-love for Clare. The girl was one of those rare fruits of the autumn of matrimony? and John Kavanagh was old enough to be her grandfather. Her mother died when the child was born. Her grownup brothers?one was drowned in the Hulling Machine Falls and the other was a roaring rake who shamed his father and killed himself with drink. On Clare did John Kavanagh set all his love?but it was a strange, rather secret, an abashed sort of love, if so one may term it. Somehow, the old man had found it impossible to take his daughter to him in paternal intimacy. Mercenaries were her companions in her home. But the flattery of those who were paid to minister to her made empty compliments forever distasteful and infected sincerity itself with distrust and disgust. Her father had declared that she should not be in the woods or of the woods; he had even insisted that shespend her college vacations in travel. To be a lady with the best of ‘em, to have wisdom and elegance and his money when he was done with it, such was his ambition for her. He felt unable to express to her, face to face, his love. He had an idea that by making her what she was and leaving her his money he was expressing love better than by words. In this manner had Clare been thrust away from exercising affection in its most natural expression. Her letters to her father were lamentable expositions of her lack of i…
