His tone was quite quiet, but the words amazed Frances. The girl to whom they were addressed merely nodded and turned to the door. She went out in silence, leaving it open behind her.
“They always do that,” said Mr. Dermot, with a sort of weary patience. “I wonder, might I trouble you to shut it?”
Frances rose to do so, her mind still full of wonder at the curious attitude he had adopted towards his daughter.
“You think it strange,” he said, as she sat down again, “that there should be so great a lack of sympathy between certain members of my family and myself. But I assure you it did not originate with me. I am a student, Miss Thorold, and perhaps it is not surprising that those who devote the whole of themselves to manual labour on a farm should find it difficult to keep in touch with me. It is said that if you associate with the animals you will in time assimilate their characteristics. This has already happened to Arthur, and some of the girls are following in his footsteps. Milly is the only one who has shown no outward sign of deterioration since we came to Tetherstones. It is a very insidious evil, and it spreads—it spreads.” He sighed. “I foresaw it before we came here. I was never in favour of the scheme, but—I was overruled. We have a tyrant among us whose will is law.”
“Then you don’t like Tetherstones?” Frances said.
She saw again an extraordinary gleam in his eyes as he made reply. “You might ask a convict how he likes Princetown,” he said. “My place is at Oxford, but I have been torn from it and made to endure life in the desert all these years.”
“But a very beautiful desert,” suggested Frances.
He made a wide gesture of repudiation. “What is that to an exile? When you have been made to eat stones for bread, you will not notice if they are beautiful to look at.”
“I can understand that,” she said. “Yet a sense of beauty is sometimes a help. At least I found it so when I was at Burminster.”
“Ah! Burminster!” He repeated the name thoughtfully. “Did you ever meet anyone there of the name of Rotherby?”