“Yes, I think he is right,” said Mrs Orde, sighing. She was looking at her son, and admiring his sweet temper, but for all that she thought it was necessary to oppose his opinions, lest they should carry him too far. Winifred was glancing from one to the other, with her eyes dilating and then melting.
“Well,” Frank said good-humouredly, “it sometimes requires greater courage to stick to the popular side than to go against it. If my doctrine is ruining the country, the want of it is injuring David Stephens, unless I am much mistaken.”
“All the better,—if it drives him out of the place.”
“O Anthony!” said Winifred, in a low tone of hurt reproach. He looked round and saw she was on the other side, and grew a little white. Frank looked at the same moment and brightened.
“It is wiser not to mix one’s self up with such persons,” said Mrs Orde, talking exactly contrary to what she would have done, as people often do.
“No, mother,” said Captain Orde, becoming grave, “that is a very helpless receipt. I suppose you don’t want me to say that I don’t agree with the end to which this man’s thoughts have led him? But they have surely in some measure been forced upon him, and I hold that we are to blame for it, and are responsible. I should be very glad to convince him that we have a common interest, instead of dwelling with such persistence upon our points of antagonism.”
“You must excuse my doubting the wisdom of your plan,” Anthony said in the tone the conversation seemed to have awakened in him. “My own conviction is that, for the sake of others, these men should be put down with a strong hand.”
He was too bitter to be anything but unjust, and Winifred looked sadly at him, thinking of his own troubles, and the misjudging which she had thought might have softened him towards others. She knew nothing of that other trouble which had its grip upon his heart as he glanced round at the bright room with its warm lights, and at Winifred and Frank, thinking angrily that he had cut himself off from her, and another had come in and filled his place. Nobody knew the wild, mad thoughts that were battling with him that night. All that could be seen were four or five people smiling and chatting, the fire crackling and leaping round a log of wood, and throwing dancing shadows on the pretty chintzes, and the bits of quaint old china, and the piano where Bessie was playing soft visionary music with tears in her eyes; for the Squire had liked the dreamy chords, and the girl had gone back to him, as she did more often than they fancied. And yet to one of the number the pleasant and kindly harmony of the hour was full of sharp discords, of things that fretted and jarred him. He made up his mind that he would not come again. He looked reproachfully at Winifred.
And yet, as he walked home across the silent fields, on which the moon was casting cold silvery streaks, he felt as he had never felt before, as if he could not marry Ada Lovell.