‘To take Owen to sea? Indeed, I hoped you were convinced that it would never answer.’
‘So far from being so, that I see it is his best chance. He will do no good till the priggishness is knocked out of him.’
Honor would not trust herself to answer. Any accusation but this might have been borne.
‘Well, well,’ said the captain, in a tone still more provoking, it was so like hushing a petulant child, ‘we know how kind you were, and that you meant everything good; but it is not in the nature of things that a lad alone with women should not
be cock of the walk, and nothing cures that like a month on board.’
‘He will go to school,’ said Honor, convinced all this was prejudice.
‘Ay, and come home in the holidays, lording it as if he were master and more, like the son and heir.’
‘Indeed, Captain Charteris, you are quite mistaken; I have never allowed Owen to think himself in that position. He knows perfectly well that there are nearer claims upon me, and that Hiltonbury can never belong to him. I have always rejoiced that it should be so. I should not like to have the least suspicion that there could be self-interest in his affection for me in the time to come; and I think it presumptuous to interfere with the course of Providence in the matter of inheritances.’
‘My good Miss Charlecote,’ said the captain, who had looked at her with somewhat of a pitying smile, instead of attending to her last words, ‘do you imagine that you know that boy?’
‘I do not know who else should,’ she answered, quivering between a disposition to tears at the harshness, and to laughter at the assumption of the stranger uncle to see farther than herself into her darling.