“Not gone to chapel?” he frowned.
“No! ... I say, father, I just wanted to speak to you.”
Darius made no reply, but shifted his glance from Edwin to the fire, and maintained his frown. He was displeased at the interruption. Edwin failed to shut the door at the first attempt, and then banged it in his nervousness. In spite of himself he felt like a criminal. Coming forward, he leaned his loose, slim frame against a corner of the old piano.
Three.
“Well?” Darius growled impatiently, even savagely. They saw each other, not once a week, but at nearly every hour of every day, and they were surfeited of the companionship.
“Supposing I wanted to get married?” This sentence shot out of Edwin’s mouth like a bolt. And as it flew, he blushed very red. In the privacy of his mind he was horribly swearing.
“So that’s it, is it?” Darius growled again. And he leaned forward and picked up the poker, not as a menace, but because he too was nervous. As an opposer of his son he had never had quite the same confidence in himself since Edwin’s historic fury at being suspected of theft, though apparently their relations had resumed the old basis of bullying and submission.
“Well—” Edwin hesitated. He thought, “After all, people do get married. It won’t be a crime.”
“Who’st been running after?” Darius demanded inimically. Instead of being softened by this rumour of love, by this hint that his son had been passing through wondrous secret hours, he instinctively and without any reason hardened himself and transformed the news into an offence. He felt no sympathy, and it did not occur to him to recall that he too had once thought of marrying. He was a man whom life had brutalised about half a century earlier.