He looked at her curiously for a few moments, then he said, laying down his tumbler:
“What stuff is this? Is it not true that you agreed to listen to Clifton six months ago? Heavens above us! Another man—quite another man! Have you been making a fool of Clifton and—and yourself, and do you now think to make a fool of me?”
“I am ready to admit everything,” she cried plaintively. “I have been a fool, I know. I have behaved badly—with no sense of honour—basely—basely—but I am wretched and I will not marry Ernest Clifton—oh, nothing will force me to marry him.”
“Poor child! poor child! It is quite natural this maidenly shrinking!” said the father smiling like a mulberry. “Bromide of potassium—that will steady you. After all, you are not going to be married tomorrow, nor even the next day. Give yourself a night off, my child. Don’t let your mother rush you. It’s all very well for her. At her age women can do anything; but a girl’s nerves——”
“It is not my nerves—it is—because I love another man—and I mean to love him. I cannot help it—I have tried—God knows—oh, my dear father, you will pity me—you must pity me, no matter how foolish I have been.”
She broke down and would have thrown herself into his arms but that he was too quick for her. At the first suggestion of such a thing, he had picked up his tumbler half full of Apollinaris. That saved him. It was on a big red leather chair that she was sobbing, not on his shirt front.
“Poor child—poor child, poor—bromide,” he murmured. “Tell me all about it, my Josephine—my little Josephine. I have had a busy night of it but I can give five minutes to the troubles of my little girl.”
He flattered himself that he was acting the part of the father to a quaver. He half believed that she would accept his representation of an honourable character without misgiving. What could she know of the terms of the contract which he had made—in the most delicate way, no word being used on either side to which exception could be taken by a sensitive person—with Ernest Clifton, respecting the feeling of the ticklish constituency of Arbroath Burghs?
She lost some precious moments of the night in sobbing. But though her father did not know very much about women he knew enough to cause him to refrain from asking her to come to the point upon which she was anxious to talk to him. Upstairs the door of the Lady Gwendolen’s dressing-room banged.
“Poor little Josey!” said the father smoothing her hair. He felt that he really would miss her when Clifton had married her and he had got his seat in the Cabinet.