"Well, there is something in all that, Katherine. But I suppose the fact is that a woman—especially a woman in the position you've been towards B—is always on the lookout for something to happen between a man and a girl who make friends. I can only tell you that I wasn't. I wouldn't have expected it to come on suddenly like that. I've known all about Caroline and her friendships. I suppose you know that Francis Parry wants to marry her. She told me all about it. She's told me about other proposals she's had. That seems to me the normal course with girls who can tell everything to their father, as mine can to me."
She laughed at him quietly. "Caroline has never been in love," she said, "or anywhere near it. Of course she tells you everything, because she wants an excuse for not doing what she thinks perhaps she ought to do. She puts the responsibility on you. When she does fall in love you will very likely know nothing about it until she tells you just as B did."
He laughed in his turn. "I know Caroline better than you do," he said. "And I thought B was like her. I'm very distressed about the way she's taking this, Katherine. She's a different child altogether. A day or two ago I thought she was beginning to get over it; but she mopes about and is getting thin. She doesn't want to go away either, though there are plenty of people who want her. And between her and me, instead of being what it always has been,—well, she's like a different person. I hardly know her. There has been no time in my life when things have gone so wrong—except when Margaret died. And until this happened we were enjoying ourselves more than ever. You saw how we'd got ourselves into the right sort of life when you came to Abington. It's all changed now."
"Poor George!" she said. "You couldn't expect it to last quite like that at Abington, you know. You should have bought your country house ten years ago, when the girls were only growing up. You can't keep them there indefinitely. As for B, you can change all that trouble for yourself easily enough. I think, in spite of what you say, you must see that there was not a good enough reason for refusing Lassigny for her. Let it come on again and she'll be happy enough; and she'll be to you what she always has been."
"Oh, my dear Katherine, you, and Mary, and everybody else, quite ignore the fact that it is Lassigny who has withdrawn himself. If I wanted him for B, which I certainly don't, how could I get him? You don't propose, I should think, that I should write to him and ask him to reconsider his withdrawal."
"No, but there are other ways. If you were to withdraw your opposition, and it were known to him that you had done so! I think you ought not to make too much of his withdrawal. He had every right to suppose that you would not object to him as a husband for one of the girls. No man could think anything else after he had been treated as you treated him, and his position is good enough for him to consider himself likely to be welcomed as a suitor. He would be, by almost every parent in England. You can't be surprised at his having taken offence. It would be just as difficult for him to recede from the position you forced him into as for you."
He was silent. "I really don't think it's fair on B to leave it like this," she said. "She will get over it, of course; but she will always think that you hastily decided something for her that she ought to have decided for herself."
"Perhaps it was decided too hastily," he said unwillingly. "I should have been satisfied, I think, to have had a delay. I should always have hated the idea, but——"
"Would you consent now to a delay, if he were to come forward again?"
"Oh, my dear Katherine, what are you plotting? Why not let the child get over it, as she will in a few months?"