I nearly said, "Hang first love!" but I held my tongue, fortunately, for of course she meant well, and was only doing her best for her nephew. But how anyone could love that fellow passes my understanding! Why, it seems to me the creature's parents could hardly have loved him, unless he had had something of the monstrous hypnotism, as well as the selfishness, of a young cuckoo in its stolen nest. Yet the same hypnotism may influence birds outside the nest, I suppose. That's the only way to account for an infatuation on the part of Ellaline.
"If you are angry, Dick and I must go away," Mrs. Senter went on. "But he couldn't help falling in love, and to me they seem made for each other."
I had to answer that of course I wasn't angry, but I thought any talk of love premature, to say the least.
"You won't actually refuse your consent, then?" asked she.
"Much good my refusing would do, if the girl really cares!" said I. "I shan't disinherit her, whatever she does."
Mrs. Senter laughed at that. "Why, even if you did," said she, "it wouldn't matter greatly to them, because Dick has something of his own, and she is an heiress, isn't she?"
Then—I don't know whether I was wrong or not—but I swear I made the answer I did without any mean or selfish motives—if I can read my own soul. If Burden were a fortune-hunter, I wanted to save her from him, that's all. I told Mrs. Senter that Ellaline had very little money of her own. "I shall look after her, of course," I said. "But the amount of the dot I may give will be determined by circumstances."
I don't know that I mayn't have put this in a tactless way. Anyhow, Mrs. Senter looked rather odd—hurt, or distressed, or something queer—I couldn't make quite out. She said, nevertheless, that Dick did not care for Miss Lethbridge's money. He had fallen in love with her the first time they met. Nothing else mattered, as they would have enough to live on. But she had supposed the girl almost too rich for Dick. Wasn't Ellaline a relation of the millionaire family of Lethbridges? She had heard so.
I answered that the relationship was distant. That Ellaline's father had once been a friend of mine, and that her mother had been my cousin, though a French girl.
"Oh!" said Mrs. Senter, as if suddenly enlightened. "Is she—by any chance—the daughter of a Frederic Lethbridge?"