“That’s all. I told him, of course, that Joe was quite free.”
“Of course. But that being so, where does your ‘poor fellow!’ come in. Why not ‘lucky fellow’?”
Amber shook her head more sadly than she had shaken it before.
“The pity of it! the pity of it!” she murmured. “Poor Joe!”
“Poor yourself!” laughed Sir Creighton. “You cannot be ambitious enough to wish to include all the world in your pity. Why ‘poor Josephine’?”
“She confessed to me that she hated him,” said Amber in a whisper—the whisper of an aspen—tremulous rather than sibilant.
“What, hated him? I had no idea that she cared so much as that for him already,” said her father. “Are you sure that she confessed to hating him?”
Amber’s hands dropped from his arm, but her eyes did not drop from his face.
“Do you mean—you cannot mean—that—that all may yet be well?” she cried.
“My dear girl,” said he, smiling a smile which he had provisionally patented since his daughter had made it a practice to consult him on curious points of psychology and diction and deportment. “My dear daughter, I have, as you well know, little time to devote to the study of temperament or poetry or unpractical things of that sort, but I have seen enough in the course of a busy but not wholly unobservant life, to convince me that when a young woman goes so far as to confess that she hates any particular young man, or old man, for that matter—she has gone very far in the direction of saying that she loves that particular man. I don’t say that Josephine——”