“I suppose you mean to marry that rascal of a tutor!” he said.
She started up, and called Donal. But to her relief he did not answer: he was fast asleep.
“He would not thank you for the suggestion, I fear,” she said, sitting down again. “He is far above me!”
“Is there no chance for Forgue then?”
“Not the smallest. I would rather have died where you left me than—”
“If you love me, don’t mention that!” he cried. “I was not myself—indeed I was not! I don’t know now—that is, I can’t believe sometimes I ever did it.”
“Uncle, have you asked God to forgive you!”
“I have—a thousand times.”
“Then I will never speak of it again.”
In general, however, he was sullen, cantankerous, abusive. They were all compassionate to him, treating him like a spoiled, but not the less in reality a sickly child. Arctura thought her grandmother could not have brought him up well; more might surely have been made of him. But Arctura had him after a lifetime fertile in cause of self-reproach, had him in the net of sore sickness, at the mercy of the spirit of God. He was a bad old child—this much only the wiser for being old, that he had found the ways of transgressors hard.