'And now, Mrs. M'Connell, is there anything else you have to say?'
'No.'
'It's a pity, then, that you took the trouble to dress yourself up to come over here and try to make trouble between a father and his daughter. If I might make bold to give you a bit of advice, it would be to mind your own business more. If you looked after other folks' affairs less and your own better, your husband mightn't be owin' me that twenty-five pound this minute.'
At this personal turn in the conversation Mrs. M'Connell hastily left.
But though the enemy was thus put to flight in confusion, she left no less consternation behind her. Now that his visitor was gone, the old man was quite at a loss to explain to himself the impulse which had led him to make a suggestion at which yesterday he would have held up his hands in horror. It had sprung suddenly full-armed from nowhere. Even now the idea did not possess that impossibility for him that he expected. He examined it—Daly was one of the inferior race, a Celt, a peasant by blood, and a Roman Catholic by religion, but now all those things were as nothing in his eyes. He could only remember him as the faithful servant and as the possible lover of his daughter.
That last was the idea that swallowed up all others. He thought of his own religious strictness, and it had suddenly retired very far away. The thought of his wife, and through her of her daughter, was nearer him to-night than it had been any time these twenty years. What was it that had roused these old memories, this sudden tenderness? He asked himself this question, and found the solution in the mysterious manner of his visitor; he had not permitted her to say all that she had come prepared to say. What was this evil that threatened him?
In the ordinary course of affairs the old man would have spoken to his daughter at once; but this uneasiness determined him to see for himself, first of all, how matters lay.
That night was Saturday, and he avoided Maggie all the evening. In the morning he followed her when she went to church, and found himself, for the first time for many years, sitting behind the pew where the two lovers were sitting together, where he and his wife had once sat in the days that now came back so freshly to his memory.
Maggie's profile, with the sun shining on it, was the very image of his wife; and his heart grew yet softer as he noticed the confident droop of her little head towards her lover. Nor did the devotion with which Daly watched her every motion escape him. He stole softly from the church, feeling as though he had suddenly grown very old, and that he had lost something out of his life which he had never troubled to make his own, but which he had nevertheless expected to be always there when he stretched out his hand to gather it. Now that the first place in his daughter's affections was lost to him forever, he suddenly discovered its value. But he was a strictly just man, and recognized that he was himself entirely to blame for the loss that he had sustained.
He felt very tired, and sat idly in his chair, his hands resting upon the arms, waiting for his daughter's return. When she came in and found him there, she started; it was the first time for the last six months that he had been home before her, and she knew that the Wesleyan service could not be over yet. What brought him there?