'My dear, that is a strange thing to say of your own child,' whispered the mother.
'Most strange!' said Julia, lifting both her hands up in an agony.
'But it's true,' roared the squire. 'She says that, let the law say what it may, these people are not to be regarded as man and wife.'
'Not by me,' said Julia.
'Who are you that you are to set up a tribunal of your own? And if you judge of another couple in that way, why isn't some one to judge of you after the same fashion?'
'There is the verdict,' said Mr. Smirkie. 'No verdict has pronounced me a bigamist.'
'But it might for anything I know,' said the squire, angrily. 'Some woman might come up in Plum-cum-Pippins and say you had married her before your first wife.'
'Papa, you are very disagreeable,' said Julia.
'Why shouldn't there be a wicked lie told in one place as well as in another? There has been a wicked lie told here; and when the lie is proved to have been a lie, as plain as the nose on your face, he is to tell me that he won't believe the young folk to be man and wife because of an untrue verdict! I say they are man and wife;—as good a man and wife as you and he;—and let me see who'll refuse to meet them as such in my house?'
Mr. Smirkie had not, in truth, made the offensive remark. It had been made by Mrs. Smirkie. But it had suited the squire to attribute it to the clergyman. Mr. Smirkie was now put upon his mettle, and was obliged either to agree or to disagree. He would have preferred the former, had he not been somewhat in awe of his wife. As it was, he fell back upon the indiscreet assertion which his father-in-law had made some time back. 'I, at any rate, sir, have not had a verdict against me.'