The father gazed at him long and steadily.
“Well, I always knew you were a fool,” he said at last with paternal candour; “but I never yet knew you were quite such a fool as this business shows you. You’ll have to marry the girl now in the end. Why the devil couldn’t you marry her outright at first, instead of seducing her?”
“I did not seduce her,” Alan answered stoutly. “No man on earth could ever succeed in seducing that stainless woman.”
Dr Merrick stared hard at him without changing his attitude on his old oak chair. Was the boy going mad, or what the dickens did he mean by it?
“You have seduced her,” he said slowly. “And she is not stainless if she has allowed you to do so.”
“It is the innocence which survives experience that I value, not the innocence which dies with it,” Alan answered gravely.
“I don’t understand these delicate distinctions,” Dr Merrick interposed with a polite sneer. “I gather from what you said just now that the lady is shortly expecting her confinement; and as she isn’t married, you tell me, I naturally infer that somebody must have seduced her—either you, or some other man.”
It was Alan’s turn now to draw himself up very stiffly.
“I beg your pardon,” he answered; “you have no right to speak in such a tone about a lady in Miss Barton’s position. Miss Barton has conscientious scruples about the marriage-tie, which in theory I share with her; she was unwilling to enter into any relations with me except in terms of perfect freedom.”
“I see,” the old man went on with provoking calmness. “She preferred, in fact, to be, not your wife, but your mistress.”