“Were you never young once, father?” said the girl in her softest tone, bending over him and sliding an arm round his shoulders.
“Young? Young? Well, Wyvern’s not particularly young at any rate, and ought to have known better.” Then, bitterly, “I wish to God we’d never set eyes on him.”
The arm was removed.
“You didn’t always wish that. You thought a great deal of him once.”
“That was before I found out he was no good,” retorted Le Sage, who had succeeded in lashing himself up again. “Pity, while you were about it, if you must go in for—for leaving me—you didn’t fix upon some solid and sensible fellow like Warren, for instance, instead of a mere dreamer. Warren’s worth fifty of such wasters as that.”
The “leaving me” had softened the girl, but the opprobrious term applied to her fiancé had been as the one nail that driveth out another.
“Don’t call him names,” she said, coldly, not angrily, thanks to her power of self-control. “He has been unfortunate, but he is the most honourable man who ever lived. The word ‘waster’ doesn’t apply.”
“Oh, I’m not saying anything against his honour,” snapped her father. “But the fact remains that he has never done any good for himself and never will. He’s no chicken, mind; he can’t be so very many years younger than myself. And when a man of his age gets to that age and is—well, where Wyvern is, the chances are a thousand to one he never picks himself up again. How’s that?”
“How’s that? It isn’t.”
“Isn’t it. Well, then, Lalanté, now we’re well on the subject I want you to understand that this affair between you and him had better be broken off. In fact it must be broken off.”