“To your father, certainly, poor, dear old boy! You must excuse me, Miss Wendermott. Your father and I were at Eton together, and I think I may say that we were always something more than lawyer and client—a good deal more, a good deal more! He was a fine fellow at heart—a fine, dear fellow. Bless me, to think that you are his daughter!”
“It's very nice to hear you speak of him so, Mr. Cuthbert,” she said. “My father may have been very foolish—I suppose he was really worse than foolish—but I think that he was most abominably and shamefully treated, and so long as I live I shall never forgive those who were responsible for it. I don't mean you, Mr. Cuthbert, of course. I mean my grand-father and my uncle.” Mr. Cuthbert shook his head slowly.
“The Earl,” he said, “was a very proud man—a very proud man.”
“You may call it pride,” she exclaimed. “I call it rank and brutal selfishness! They had no right to force such a sacrifice upon him. He would have been content, I am sure, to have lived quietly in England—to have kept out of their way, to have conformed to their wishes in any reasonable manner. But to rob him of home and friends and family and name—well, may God call them to account for it, and judge them as they judged him!”
“I was against it,” he said sadly, “always.”
“So Mr. Davenant told me,” she said. “I can't quite forgive you, Mr. Cuthbert, for letting me grow up and be so shamefully imposed upon, but of course I don't blame you as I do the others. I am only thankful that I have made myself independent of my relations. I think, after the letters which I wrote to them last night, they will be quite content to let me remain where they put my father—outside their lives.”
“I had heard,” Mr. Cuthbert said hesitatingly, “that you were following some occupation. Something literary, is it not?”
“I am a journalist,” Ernestine answered promptly, “and I'm proud to say that I am earning my own living.”
He looked at her with a fine and wonderful curiosity. In his way he was quite as much one of the old school as the Earl of Eastchester, and the idea of a lady—a Wendermott, too—calling herself a journalist and proud of making a few hundreds a year was amazing enough to him. He scarcely knew how to answer her.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “you have some of your father's spirit, some of his pluck too. And that reminds me—we wrote to you to call.”