"How soon shall I leave Guernsey?" I asked.
"He cannot go until you are well again, uncle," she answered. "I will stay here to nurse you, and Martin must take care of your patients. We will send him word a day or two before we return, and I should like him to be gone before we reach home."
That was my sentence of banishment. She had only addressed me once during the conversation. It was curious to see how there was no resentment in her manner toward my father, who had systematically robbed her, while she treated me with profound wrath and bitterness.
She allowed him to hold her hand and stroke her hair; she would not have suffered me to approach her. No doubt it was harder for her to give up a lover than to lose the whole of her property.
She left us, to make the necessary arrangements for staying with my father, whose illness appeared to have lost suddenly its worst symptoms. As soon as she was gone he regarded me with a look half angry, half contemptuous.
"What a fool you are!" he said. "You have no tact whatever in the management of women. Julia would fly back to you, if you only held up your finger."
"I have no wish to hold up my finger to her," I answered. "I don't think life with her would be so highly desirable."
"You thought so a few weeks ago," he said, "and you'll be a pauper without her."
"I was not going to marry her for her money," I replied. "A few weeks ago I cared more for her than for any other woman, except my mother, and she knew it. All that is changed now."
"Well well!" he said, peevishly, "do as you like. I wash my hands of the whole business. Julia will not forsake me if she renounces you, and I shall have need of her and her money. I shall cling to Julia."