It was one of his own phrases, thus consecrated for use in the family on all suitable occasions. That this could be considered one was her rejection of unnecessary emotion.
"You've been very good about it, darling," he said, some sense of not having given her the place due to her love stealing upon him. "I shouldn't have got through it as well as I have, but for you."
This was balm to her. He had not yet put a question to her as to Beatrix, and she made haste to satisfy him.
"She's sorry she went against you so much," she said. "But before she knew—last night—she says she wanted you more than she had done for a long time. She thinks now she would have come not to want him so much, even if—if this hadn't happened."
"Oh, yes, I know," he said. "I felt it, and half-hoped it might mean that, but didn't like to hope too much. You know, darling, it was more instinct with me than anything. It didn't seem to me a right—what shall I say?—a right combination—those two. When I was tackled about it—by Aunt Katherine and others—I couldn't put up much of a defence. But none of them ever made me feel any different, though I gave way. I should have hated it, always, if it had come off. I couldn't have helped myself, though I should have tried to make the best of it for B's sake. Didn't you feel it wouldn't have done?"
She was silent for a moment. She hadn't felt it, and the thought troubled her loyal mind that because she had not been able to show him that her instinct was with his, which now had proved itself to be the right one, she had failed him. "I don't think anybody saw it plainly but you, darling," she said. "I suppose we didn't know enough. It's fortunate that it has turned out as it has."
"Well, there it is," he said, after a pause. "It's lucky that it has turned out as it has. If it hadn't, although I felt what I did about it, I couldn't have done anything—shouldn't have done anything. You want to save your child, and you can't do it. You can't act, in these matters, on what your judgment tells you, unless you've got a clear reason that all the world will recognise. If you do, the whole pack's against you, and the child you're doing it for at the head of them. Perhaps it's weakness to give way, as I did, but for the little I did manage to bring about I've gone through, as you say, a hog of a time. If I'd done more I should have lost more still, and she'd never have known that what has happened now didn't happen because of me. It's a difficult position for us fathers who love their daughters and whose love doesn't count against the other fellow's, when it comes along, even when it isn't all it ought to be. That B has been saved this time—it's a piece of luck. It makes you think a bit. You can't take it in and be glad of it all at once."
She could not follow all of this expression of the time-old problem of fatherhood, but seized upon one point of it to give him comfort. "It does count, darling," she said. "It always must, when a father has been what you have been to us."
"It hasn't counted much with B. Perhaps it will again now."
"Oh, yes, it will. It was there all the time. It will be, more than ever now. She'll see by and by what you've saved her from."