But the doctor was too much disturbed to smile. "Why shouldn't he come begging? It won't be his modesty that will stand in his way, I daresay. Or perhaps he wants to 'convert' you, as these fellows are pleased to call it!"
"Nobody seems to be afraid of our wanting to convert him!" said Minnie.
"I don't like the sort of thing. I don't like that people should have it to say that my daughter is honoured with the confidences of a parcel of ranting, canting cobblers."
"But, papa, would it not—I am speaking in sober sincerity, and because I really do want your serious answer—don't you think it would be wrong to be deterred from helping anyone with a kind word or a kind deed, by the fear of people saying this or that?"
"Helping a fiddlestick!" cried Dr. Bodkin magisterially, but incoherently.
Minnie's face fell. It had been paler than usual of late, and she had been suffering and feeble. She never lamented aloud, nor was importunate, nor even showed weakness of temper; but her father, who loved her very tenderly, understood the chill look of disappointment well enough, and it was more than he had strength to bear.
"Of course the man can come and say his say," he added, jerking his legs again impatiently under the sheltering mahogany, "especially as you say he is going away from Whitford directly."
"Yes; but there is no guarantee that he will not come back again. I cannot promise you that, on his behalf."
This unflinching straightforwardness of Minnie's was a fertile source of trouble between her father and herself.
It was certainly rather hard on the doctor to be forced to surrender absolutely, without any of those pleasant pretences which are equivalent to the honours of war. Fortunately—we are limiting ourselves to the doctor's point of view—fortunately at this moment his eye fell on Mrs. Bodkin, who, made exquisitely nervous by any collision between the two great forces that ruled her life, was pushing the decanter of port backwards and forwards on the slippery table, quite unconscious of that mechanical movement.