At this truly American declaration, the Professor of Theology laid down his copy of Olshausen, and stared at the heretic missionary.
“My daughter!” he gasped, “your wife?—I beg your pardon,” he added, when he saw the expression of Bayard’s face. “But you have taken me altogether by surprise. I may say that such a possibility has never—no, never once so much as occurred to me.”
“I have loved her,” said Bayard tenaciously, “for three years. I have never been able to ask her to marry me till now. I think perhaps my uncle meant to make it possible for me to do so, but I do not know. I am still a poor man, sir, but I can keep her from suffering. She does me the undeserved honor to love me, and she asked me to tell you so.”
The Professor had risen and was pacing the study hotly. His face was rigid. He waved his thin, long fingers impatiently at Bayard’s words.
“Scholars do not dwell upon paltry, pecuniary facts like parents in lower circles of society!” cried the Professor with superbly unconscious hauteur. “There would have lacked nothing to my daughter’s comfort, sir, in any event—if the right man had wooed her. I was not the father to refuse him mere pecuniary aid to Helen’s happiness.”
“And I was not the lover to ask for it,” observed Bayard proudly.
“Hum—m—m,” said the Professor. He stopped his walk across the study floor, and looked at Bayard with troubled respect.
“I will not take her from you at once,” urged Bayard gently; “we will wait till fall—if I can. She has said that she will become my wife, then.”
His voice sank. He spoke the last words with a delicate reverence which would have touched a ruder father than the Professor of Theology.
“Bayard,” he said brokenly, “you always were my favorite student. I couldn’t help it. I always felt a certain tenderness for you. I respect your intellectual traits, and your spiritual quality. Poverty, sir? What is poverty? But, Bayard, you are not sound!”