"And that is?" said Ernshaw, smiling, almost laughing, in the sheer joy of his great triumph, as he so honestly believed it to be, over the Powers of Evil.
"Well, it's this," said Vane, "my own life is settled now. I can't marry Enid and, of course, I'll marry no one else. I shall do as you have often advised me to do—take Orders and do the work that God puts nearest to my hand. I know that the governor will agree with me when I put it to him in that way. But then there's some one else."
"Your sister, you mean," said Ernshaw.
"My half——"
"Your sister, I said," Ernshaw interrupted, quickly. "Well, what about her?"
"It's this way," continued Vane, somewhat awkwardly, "you see—of course, as you say, she is my sister in a way, but she has absolutely refused everything that the governor and I have offered her. We even asked her to come and live with us, we offered, in short, to acknowledge her as one of the family."
"And what did she say to that?"
"She simply refused. She said that she had not made her life, but that she was ready to take it as it is. She said that she wasn't responsible for the world as it's made, she'd never owed anyone a shilling since she left her mother—and mine—and she never intended to. We tried everything with her, really we did, and, of course, the governor did a great deal more than I did, but it wasn't a bit of use. It's a horrible business altogether, isn't it?"
"On the contrary, it is anything but that," replied Ernshaw, slowly and deliberately as though he were considering each word as he uttered it. "Maxwell, you have just decided to take Orders. I made up my mind to do that long ago. We are both of us fairly well off. I have eight or nine hundred a year of my own, and I daresay you have more, so we can go and do our work without troubling about the loaves and fishes."
"Yes," replied Vane, "certainly, but that's not quite answering my question, old fellow:—I mean about Carol."