For he could never reveal his identity to her without betraying his baseness to her mother.
Otherwise, to hear her call him father would have been earning that happiness with a lie.

Besides, she loved Belllounds as her father, and were this trouble of the present removed she would grow still closer to the old man in his declining days.

Wade accepted the inevitable, She must never know.

If she might love him it must be as the stranger who came to her gates, it must be through the mysterious affinity between them and through the service he meant to render.
Wade did not linger after the meal was ended despite the fact that Belllounds recovered his cordiality.

It was dark when he went out.
Columbine followed him, talking cheerfully.