‘No,’ said Paul; ‘her family is Huguenot. I think I should rather have shrunk from marrying a Catholic. There’s a sort of prejudice of which it isn’t easy to free the mind.’
He was sinking clean out of sight of his own esteem; but it was his sole business for the time being to save his father as far as possible, and he had grown reckless of himself.
‘She shall come to see you,’ he went on, ‘and you wont be able to help making friends with her. I’ve to be back in Montcourtois to-morrow night, or she’ll be worrying her life out. That means I must catch the one o’clock express for town, and that, again, means that I’ve only four hours to spend at home this time.’
‘Ye’ll have a glass of whisky, Paul?’
‘I will, sir,’ Paul answered, ‘with all the pleasure in life.’
So Armstrong went to the cupboard and brought out a bottle and the sugar basin, and set the kettle on the fire, and then sat down and loaded up his pipe in silence.
‘There’s much I’d like to say, Paul,’ he began at length.
There was nothing in the act which could have moved a stranger to anything but a smile at the oddity of it, but it touched Paul almost to tears when the gray old man lugged out of his coat-tail pocket a whole newspaper, and having pinched from it a most economical fragment, singed his fingers at the bars in the act of lighting it. He had laughed at that little quaintness a hundred times as a lad, and it was somehow the first thing that had come home to him as a real reminder to be in want of reformation.’
They grew more at ease. Armstrong took up the subject he had broken a few minutes earlier.
‘I don’t guess,’ he said, ‘whether you’re believe these thoughts for yourself, but there’s a gap between you and me, Paul. Ye’ve had grave troubles.