It seemed, so she explained, in her innocent way, that he had discovered something horrible about her father which he shrank from telling her.
But if they had quarrelled so bitterly, why had her father the very next day urged her to marry him?
The answer came in a ghastly flash.
She recoiled as though in the presence of defilement.

If she married Randall, his lips would be closed against her father.

That is what her father had meant.

The vague, disquieting suspicions of years that he might not have the same standards of uprightness as other men, attained an awful certainty.

She remembered the incident of the private letter and the look in her father's eyes....