"Yes, it might," he answered without any hesitation. "If he loved her in the right way."
"Are you quite sure he doesn't, darling? If he had a chance of proving it!"
"He hasn't asked for the chance."
"It really comes back to that," said Miss Waterhouse, speaking almost for the first time. "You would not have refused him his chance, if he had asked for it?"
"I don't know. I don't think I should. If he had said that his loving Beatrix made things different to him—if he'd shown in any way that they were different to him—I don't know what I should have done. It certainly wouldn't have ended as it did."
"Well, Cara dear," said Miss Waterhouse, "I think the thing to say is that M. de Lassigny was not prepared to satisfy your father that he even wanted to be what he thought B's husband ought to be. If he had gone ever such a little way he would have had his chance."
"It is he who has given her up. I know that," said Caroline. "You didn't really send him away at all, did you? Oh, I'm sure you must have been right about him. I liked him, you know; but— He can't love B very much, I should think, if he was willing to give her up like that, at once."
That was the question upon which the unhappy clash of interests turned during the days that followed. Beatrix knew that he loved her. How could she make a mistake about that? She turned a little from Caroline, who was very loving to her but would not put herself unreservedly on her side, and poured out all her griefs to Barbara, and also to Mollie Walter. Barbara, not feeling herself capable of pronouncing upon anything on her own initiative, took frequent counsel of Miss Waterhouse, who advised her to be as sweet to B as possible, but not to admit that their father could have been wrong in the way he had acted. "There is no need to say that M. de Lassigny was," she said. "Poor B will see that for herself in time."
Poor B was quite incapable of seeing anything of the sort at present. She was also deeply offended at any expression of the supposition that she would 'get over it'—as if it were an attack of measles. She told Mollie, who gave her actually more of the sympathy that she wanted than any of her own family, that she couldn't understand her father taking this light view of love. She would have thought he understood such things better. She would never love anybody but René, even if they did succeed in keeping them apart all their lives. And she knew he would love her in the same way.
There was, however, no getting over the fact that René, when he had walked out of the Bank parlour, in offence, had walked out of his matrimonial intentions at the same time. The fashionable intelligence department announced his intention of spending the autumn at his Château in Picardy, and there was some reason to suppose that the announcement, not usual in the way it was given, might be taken as indicating to those who had thought of him as taking an English bride that his intentions in that respect had been relinquished.