"Who is the girl he wants to marry?" Mr Kenyon put in. A change had come over him in the course of Arthur's last sentences. He sat less stiffly in his chair; he had the air of a man re-confronted by some familiar trouble with which he had often battled in the past.
"Her name is Dorothy Martin," Arthur began. "She...."
Mr Kenyon interrupted him with a gesture of his hand. "I know," he said, "her father is Lord Massey's agent—a homely fellow and rather stupid. So Hubert wants to marry Miss Martin, does he?" His head drooped a little forward and he began to slide his hands slowly backward and forward along his knees.
Arthur felt suddenly sorry for him. Neither Hubert nor his father had told him that Miss Martin's father was, to put it bluntly, not in the Kenyons' class. He understood better now why they had hesitated to approach the old man. And how decently he had taken it! Without any sign of anger, even of vexation.
"I believe he's very much in love with her," Arthur murmured.
Mr Kenyon sighed and sat up. "As you remarked just now, Arthur," he said, "you naturally can't be expected to understand, and I wonder if it would be indiscreet of a very, very old man to enlighten you?"
His expression as he spoke was pathetic, wistful; he looked at Arthur as if he besought him to approve the offered confidence.
"You may be absolutely sure, sir, that I shall not repeat anything you care to tell me," Arthur assured him.
"Nor let it affect your relations with my family?" the old man added, and then while Arthur still sought a convincing reply to that rather difficult question, went on: "We are necessarily lonely in our old age, my boy, but I sometimes wonder if my case is not in some ways unusual. Or is it that I have suffered for overstepping the reasonable limit of mortality?" He rose from his chair as he spoke and began to pace slowly up and down the room.