"Your wife, Richard?"
"Yes! my wife!"
"If she had seen you, Richard?"
"God spared her that!"
Mrs. Doria, bustling in practical haste, and bearing Richard's hat and greatcoat in her energetic hands, came between them at this juncture. Dimples of commiseration were in her cheeks while she kissed her brother's perplexed forehead. She forgot her trouble about Clare, deploring his fatuity.
Sir Austin was forced to let his son depart. As of old, he took counsel with Adrian, and the wise youth was soothing. "Somebody has kissed him, sir, and the chaste boy can't get over it." This absurd suggestion did more to appease the baronet than if Adrian had given a veritable reasonable key to Richard's conduct. It set him thinking that it might be a prudish strain in the young man's mind, due to the System in difficulties.
"I may have been wrong in one thing," he said, with an air of the utmost doubt of it. "I, perhaps, was wrong in allowing him so much liberty during his probation."
Adrian pointed out to him that he had distinctly commanded it.
"Yes, yes; that is on me."
His was an order of mind that would accept the most burdensome charges, and by some species of moral usury make a profit out of them.