“He begged me not to mention it.”
“How absurd! How could his coming home concern anybody except himself and his people? Obviously a Pomfret, saturated with a sense of his own importance.”
Joyce had plenty of spirit. She retorted pleasantly but incisively:
“You are mistaken, daddy, it might be better for Lionel if he had a greater sense of his own importance. Unless he has changed very much, he is altogether too modest and unassuming.”
“Then why this ridiculous mystery about his comings and goings?”
“Because, I fancy, he may have told me first.”
Her father nodded and left the dining-room. Alone in his small study he whistled softly to himself. He was no fool, and assuredly he was no snob. It had never occurred to him that Lionel Pomfret had more than a brotherly interest in his girl. Before he went to India, the pair had played tennis together, but what of that? Lionel had been far more intimate with Joyce’s brothers.
Why should he write to her first?
Why shouldn’t he?
But Joyce had blushed a little as he left the dining-room. He attempted for the first time to envisage her as a wife, a mother. Everything that was hard in the parson softened as he beheld his daughter with a child in her arms, mistress in her own house, independent of him altogether.