“That would be to avow I had already consulted with you. No, no; I must not do that.”
“The wind-up of the epistle is charming. 'I have certainly no reason to love Ireland.' Poor Ireland! here is another infliction upon you. Let us hope you may never come to know that Lady Trafford cannot love you.”
“Come, come, Fossbrooke, be just, be fair; there is nothing so very unreasonable in the anxiety of a mother that her son, who will have a good name and a large estate, should not share them both with a person beneath him.”
“Why must she assume that this is the case,—why take it for granted that this girl must be beneath him? I tell you, sir, if a prince of the blood had fallen in love with her, it would be a reason to repeal the Royal Marriage Act.”
“I declare, Fossbrooke, I shall begin to suspect that your own heart has not escaped scathless,” said Cave, laughing.
The old man's face became crimson, but not with anger. As suddenly it grew pale; and in a voice of deep agitation he said, “When an old man like myself lays his homage at her feet, it is not hard to believe how a young man might love her.”
“How did you come to make this acquaintance?” said Cave, anxious to turn the conversation into a more familiar channel.
“We chanced to fail in with her brother on the river. We found him struggling with a fish far too large for his tackle, and which at last smashed his rod and got away. He showed not alone that he was a perfect angler, but that he was a fine-tempered fellow, who accepted his defeat manfully and well; he had even a good word for his enemy, sir, and it was that which attracted me. Trafford and he, young-men-like, soon understood each other; he came into our boat, lunched with us, and asked us home with him to tea. There 's the whole story. As to the intimacy that followed, it was mostly my own doing. I own to you I never so much as suspected that Trafford was smitten by her; he was always with her brother, scarcely at all in her company; and when he came to tell me he was in love, I asked him how he caught the malady, for I never saw him near the infection. Once that I knew of the matter, however, I made him write home to his family.”
“It was by your advice, then, that he wrote that letter?”
“Certainly; I not only advised, I insisted on it,—I read it, too, before it was sent off. It was such a letter as, if I had been the young fellow's father, would have made me prouder than to hear he had got the thanks of Parliament.”