'Sit down again; there is a great deal I should like to tell you, if you have patience to listen.'
Patience! She would fain have listened for ever. He told her the more slowly, in order to give time to rally, the history of the family struggles, dwelling at each turn on Lance's manful part in them, and resolute sacrifice of taste and ambition, and coming down to his own inheritance at Vale Leston, with all that it had involved. The fact was that it was needful to let her perceive that he had never had it in his power to marry, and never intended it; that the only mode in which he could both do his duty by his brothers and sisters, and make restitution of the church property, was by continuing his business, being economical, and raising up no fresh claims on the estate.
Probably she did not at the moment take in the idea of this affecting any relations with her, for she exclaimed, with that hot petulance which in her was never unbecoming, 'I see, it's too late; you've spent everything on everybody else, and lived for everyone but yourself.'
'I wish I had.'
'I don't think it fair!' she passionately exclaimed. 'Why should everything come on you?'
'Perhaps, when one's forefathers have done a great wrong—ignorantly, may be—it must come on some one. I have been struck by seeing how seldom the lay rectory has gone in the direct line, and I am glad to prevent it from being bound about that poor child's unconscious neck.'
'I was wrong,' she whispered under her breath, in a sudden change of mood, as the simple-heartedness of his manner impressed her. 'You are as devoted as any of those old people.'
'Not I,' he answered. 'I have had a particularly prosaic, prosperous, comfortable life of it;' and then, thinking the scene had lasted long enough, he said, 'I should like to call on Mrs. Thomas May. Is it permissible to go through the garden?'
'How can you?' she exclaimed.
'Thank you, I am quite rested' (he might have said, as much as he ever was).