“Mr. Walling! If you were not my friend and my guest, I should be very angry with you. My sweet wife is a child of the Heavenly Father! but for an earthly parent of either sex I do not know where to look.”
“Look here then, Hay, to me. I didn’t mention the difficulty without having a remedy for it. I am a childless widower, as you know. And though it would be straining a point of probability to represent a man of thirty-seven as the lawful father of a woman of nineteen, still I would like to adopt your wife as my daughter, that she may be entered in the Red Book as Judith, daughter of William Walling, Esq., attorney-at-law, New York City. Come, Hay, my friend, you know I mean the best by you and by her. Now what do you say to accepting me as your father-in-law?” inquired Will Walling, with a laugh.
Randolph Hay paused before he replied. He was more pained than pleased. Yet he appreciated the lawyer’s good intentions, and was grateful for them.
At length he answered:
“I thank you from my heart, Mr. Walling, for your intended kindness; and I feel grieved that I cannot accept your gracious proposal, since not to do so must seem so very ungracious as well as ungrateful to a friend whom I love and esteem as much as I do you. And yet I cannot accept it.”
“But why not?” inquired the lawyer.
“I—do not know. I cannot tell. I have a feeling against it which I am unable to define or analyze.”
“But I am not. I know the cause of your reluctance. It is because it would not be strictly true. That is it. You need not answer, Ran, my boy. But you must allow me to tell you that you are a little too scrupulous for a practical world, though I do not like you the less on that account,” said Will Walling, with his usual little laugh.
“And I hope my scruples, as you call them, will not affect our friendship?”
“I have just told you that they will not. There, let the matter drop!” concluded the lawyer.