"Well, we shall have our invalid downstairs to-morrow," he made his clumsy opening. "Wonderful recovery! 'Pon my word I'm beginning to think that we shall see Walter a medical knight and I don't know what all, before we're much older."
"I dare say it wasn't so bad, after all, as it was thought to be," said Joan. "Men make such a fuss about a little pain. Women bear it much better."
This speech caused the Squire to bend his brows upon her, traversing as it did all the traditions in which she had been brought up as to the relative values of the sexes, and challenging that prompt verbal chastisement with which precocious rebellion must be dealt with, if those values were to be preserved in his own household. But Joan's eyes were downcast, and he took warning, without perceiving its source, from a certain angle between the lines of her neck and her back, not to pursue a by-path which would draw him—might indeed have been opened up to draw him—from the road he had sought her out to pursue.
"Well, that's as may be," he said, dismissing the offence; "but the pain has been borne well enough by this particular man; and if a charge of shot at such close quarters that it lays bare the bone and splinters it isn't pretty serious, I don't know what is. Walter told me that he would never be able to raise that arm above his shoulder again, however well it might heal."
Joan shuddered at the staring picture, and felt herself convicted of brutal callousness.
"However," proceeded her father, who might advantageously have left an interval for his words to make their effect, "the worst is over now, and we ought to do what we can to cheer him up and help him to forget it. It's been pretty dull for him, lying there, mostly alone. Your mother has seen fit to object for some reason or other to your paying him a visit in his room, though I think those ideas can be carried too far, and there couldn't be any harm in it, especially as he's now on the sofa."
Then her mother was on her side, although she had said nothing to her. Joan perceived quite plainly that her father had asked that she might be taken to see Bobby Trench, and her mother had refused, as she sometimes did refuse the requests of her lord and master, but only if she considered them quite beyond reason. Joan was drawn to one parent, and all the more set against the other.
"I don't like Mr. Trench," she said. "I shouldn't have gone to see him, even if mother had said I might; unless she had said that I must."
"Well, she wouldn't be likely to say that, if you didn't want to," said the Squire, determined to keep the interview on a note of mild reasonableness, in spite of provocation. "But now, I should like to know why you have taken a dislike to young Trench. I saw nothing of it when he was here before."
"You told me, after he had come here in the summer, that I had been making too free with him, and that you didn't want me to have anything to do with young cubs like that; and that if I wasn't careful how I behaved I should find myself back in the schoolroom with Miss Phipp."