“Good-bye,” he said, taking Felicia’s hand; his eyes lingered on her pallor, her wanness. “I won’t silence the bird any more. I’ll see you soon again. Tell Maurice I’m sorry to miss him.”
He departed, and Mr. Merrick, arrested in his usual routine, paused, book in hand, on his way to his chair.
His frustrated passive energy took form in speech. He sat down and opened the book, observing, “I am sorry, Felicia, to be obliged to send any of your guests away.”
Felicia had noticed and wondered at the interruptions, hardly suspecting them of purpose, but now all manner of latent irritations leaped up in her. To-day, especially, she had resented her father’s appearance. She had needed Geoffrey, the haven of his silence and his strength. After that one strange moment of inner trembling, the old sense of quiet skies and an encircling shore had returned, and she had rested in it.
Now, looking up, her face sharpened with quick suspicion and quick resentment, she asked, “Obliged? Send my guests away? Indeed, papa, you could not do that.”
Her voice rather alarmed Mr. Merrick; it revealed a more resolute hostility than he had suspected; and real hostility, final or open hostility between him and his child, Mr. Merrick, in his heart of hearts, feared more than any calamity. Flattered vanity, injured trust, real anxiety for her welfare, had all helped to float his new independence, but he never contemplated really sailing away from her. He nerved himself now with the thought of his duty. Swinging his foot, speaking with measured definiteness, his eyes on his book, he said, “I shall at all events do my utmost to protect you from an undesirable intimacy.”
Felicia’s quick heart guessed at the alarm that nerved itself, and now, after the moment in which her anger rose, her sense of the ludicrous shook the anger to sudden laughter.
“Papa! how ridiculous!” she exclaimed. “Really, your prejudices shouldn’t make you say and do such foolish and such futile things. Mr. Daunt is my dearest friend—Maurice’s dearest friend.”
“It is a friendship I regret for both of you. Maurice is weak, Mr. Daunt is strong; he dominates you both.”
“What folly, my dear father!”