“Margot!”
The sternness of his tone made her look up and calm herself.
“Y-es, uncle.”
“This must stop. Adrian went by my invitation. Because I could no longer permit your association. Between his household and ours is a wrong beyond repair. He cannot help that he is his father’s son, but being such he is an impossible friend for your father’s daughter. I should have sent him away, at my very first suspicion of his identity, but—I want to be just. It has been the effort of my life to learn forgiveness. Until the last I would not allow myself even to believe who he was, but gave him the benefit of the chance that his name might be of another family. When I did know—there was no choice. He had to go.”
Margot watched his face, as he spoke, with a curious feeling that this was not the loved and loving uncle she had always known but a stranger. There were wrinkles and scars she had never noticed, a bitterness that made the voice an unfamiliar one, and a weariness in the droop of the figure leaning upon the hoe which suggested an aged and heart-broken man.
Why, only yesterday, it seemed, Hugh Dutton was the very type of a stalwart woodlander, with the grace of a finished and untiring scholar, making the man unique. Now—— If Adrian had done this thing, if his mere presence had so altered her beloved guardian, then let Adrian go! Her arms went around the man’s neck and her kisses showered upon his cheeks, his hands, even his bent white head.
“Uncle, uncle! Don’t look like that! Don’t. He’s gone and shall never come back. Everything’s gone, hasn’t it? Even that irreparable past, of which I’d never heard. Why, if I’d dreamed, do you suppose I’d even ever have spoken to him? No, indeed. Why you, the tip of your smallest finger, the smallest lock of your hair, is worth more than a thousand Adrians! I was sorry he’d treated me so rudely. But now I’m glad, glad, glad. I wouldn’t listen to him now, not if he said good-bye forever and ever. I love you, uncle, best of all the world, and you love me. Let’s be just as we were before any strangers came. Come, let’s go out on the lake.”
He smiled at her extravagance and abruptness. The times when they had gone canoeing together had been their merriest, happiest times. It seemed to her that it needed only some such outing to restore the former conditions of their life.
“Not to-day, dearest.”