“I can offer you no atonement,” he said presently, with a deep weariness in his voice.
“I am still unutterably bewildered. How I have failed, how I have failed, with my motherless girl! And I thought I knew my child—my merry Valeria, as I have called her from her babyhood—I thought I knew her through and through! She to be dishonourable, she to be heartless, she to attach herself to a godless, brainless, mannerless fellow—and when a man like yourself had received her troth! Owen, it is as though mine own right hand had turned against me.”
The Canon held out a trembling right hand and gazed upon it.
“Where is Captain Cuscaden now, sir?” enquired Quentillian, almost expecting to hear that the object of his solicitude had been bound and cast into outer darkness.
“Where!” Canon Morchard struck the table with his clenched fist until the blotting-paper and the broken pencil bounded again. “Where! I have dismissed him, Owen. Does he think that I shall give my daughter to one who comes like a thief in the night? There is such a thing as a righteous anger, and such an anger was mine then.”
It seemed to be his still, Owen reflected, and boded ill for his own wish to discuss the situation impartially.
“Valeria is very unhappy, sir.”
The Canon groaned.
“I can’t trust myself to see her, to speak to her. God knows that my place is with my unhappy child, but my shameful lack of self-control makes me tremble. I have been angry—I am angry still.”
He looked piteously at Owen.