"Do you mean that my daughter went to the Zoological Gardens alone with this man?" the father asked in dismay.
"Dick was with them. I should have gone, only I had a headache. Did you not know she went?"
"Yes;—I heard about the Gardens. But I heard nothing of the man."
"I thought, Mr. Wharton, you were all in his favour."
"I am not at all in his favour. I dislike him particularly. For anything I know he may have sold pencils about the streets like any other Jew-boy."
"He goes to church just as you do,—that is, if he goes anywhere; which I dare say he does about as often as yourself, Mr. Wharton." Now Mr. Wharton, though he was a thorough and perhaps a bigoted member of the Church of England, was not fond of going to church.
"Do you mean to tell me," he said, pressing his hands together, and looking very seriously into his sister-in-law's face; "do you mean to tell me that she—likes him?"
"Yes;—I think she does like him."
"You don't mean to say—she's in love with him?"
"She has never told me that she is. Young ladies are shy of making such assertions as to their own feelings before the due time for doing so has come. I think she prefers him to anybody else; and that were he to propose to herself, she would give him her consent to go to you."