Yet she had told her father nothing of this, for with her womanhood had come a new reserve--truths half-divined and others clearly perceived--which she could not tell any one.
He, in turn, now kept secret from her the delight he felt at her refusal.

He had tried conscientiously to persuade her into the path of salvation, when his every word was a blade to cut at his heart.

Nor was he happy when she refused so definitely the saving hand extended to her.
To know she was to come short of her glory in the after-time was anguish to him; and mingling with that anguish, inflaming and aggravating it, were his own heretical doubts that would not be gone.
In a sheer desperation of bewilderment he longed for the end, longed to know certainly his own fate and hers--to have them irrevocably fixed--so that he might no more be torn among many minds, but could begin to pay his own penalties in plain suffering, uncomplicated by this torturing necessity to choose between two courses of action.
And the time was, happily, to be short.

With the first day of 1870 he began to wait.

With prayer and fasting and vigils he waited.