He looked at me in that open-eyed way of his for a moment, and then he shifted his glance away from my face and laughed a little uneasily.
"Was I the cause?" he asked.
"Oh, dear no," cried I, eagerly, although in my heart I knew well enough that, with mother, he had been. "But you know father never did like the Thornes. They belong to that class that he dislikes so. What do you call it—capitalists? Why, he hates them ever so much worse than landed proprietors, and they are bad enough."
I said this jokingly, feeling that, as of course Frank sympathized with all these views and convictions of father's, he would understand, even though he might not himself feel just as strongly towards those members of the obnoxious class who had been his friends from his youth upward. But a shadow of annoyance or uneasiness—I did not know which—passed over his face like a little summer cloud, although the full, changeful mouth still kept its smile.
"And Mr. Thorne has done something special to vex him," I continued. "He has closed the right-of-way over the common by Dead Man's Lane. So now father has forbidden us to go to the house."
The slightest possible touch of scorn curled Frank's lip under the silky brown mustache.
"That's a pity," said he.
"Well," said I, "you would feel just the same, of course, if these people didn't happen to be old friends of yours, and they never were friends of father's. He disliked them buying the property from the very first."
"It makes things rather uncomfortable to drive a theory as far as that," laughed Frank.
Of course it was what I often felt myself, but somehow it vexed me to hear him say so; if he was the friend to father that he seemed to be, he had no business to say it, and specially to me.