“Now,” he said bluntly, “I think you had better go off to bed. I have still a lot of work to do.”
His wife obeyed without a word, and the girl was following her, when he called her back.
“Mary,” he said, laying his hand upon her shoulder, “I’m afraid I’m not the best man that ever lived, but I’ve tried to make you happy, my dear, in my own way. You’ve been as a daughter to me.”
She looked up at him with shining eyes. She could not trust herself to speak.
“Things haven’t gone as well as they might during the past year,” he said. “I made a colossal blunder, but I made it with my eyes open. It hasn’t been pleasant for either of us, but there’s no sense in regretting what you cannot mend. Mary, they tell me that you’ve been seeing a lot of this young man Anderson?”
She was annoyed to find herself going red when there was really no reason for it. She need not ask who “they” were, she could guess.
“I’ve been making inquiries about that boy,” said Sir John slowly, “and I can tell you this, he is straight. Perhaps he has led an unconventional life, but all that he told Sadie was true. He’s clean, and, Mary, that counts for something in this world.”
He seemed at a loss how to proceed.
“Anything might happen,” he went on. “Although I’m not an old man, I have enemies. . . .”
“You don’t mean——”