His son and elder daughter were distinctly a credit to him.
Five years after Monica's birth Angela unexpectedly was born to the Kingsnorths.
A delicate, sickly infant, it seemed as if the splendid blood of the family had expended its vigour on the elder children.
Angela needed constant attention to keep her alive. From tremulous infancy she grew into delicate youth. None of the strict standards Kingsnorth had used so effectually with his other children applied to her. She seemed a child apart.
Not needing her, Kingsnorth did not love her. He gave her a form of tolerant affection. Too fragile to mix with others, she was brought up at home. Tutors furnished her education. The winters she passed abroad with her mother. When her mother died she spent them with relations or friends. The grim dampness of the English climate was too rigorous for a life that needed sunshine.
Angela had nothing in common with either her brother or her sister. She avoided them and they her. They did not understand her: she understood them only too well!
A nature that craved for sympathy and affection—as the frail so often do—was repulsed by those to whom affection was but a form, and sympathy a term of reproach.
She loved all that was beautiful, and, as so frequently happens in such natures as Angela's, she had an overwhelming pity for all that were unhappy. To her God made the world beautiful: man was responsible for its hideousness. From her heart she pitied mankind for abusing the gifts God had showered on them.
It was on her first home-coming since her mother's death that her attention was really drawn to her father's Irish possessions.
By a curious coincidence she returned home the clay following Wilberforce Kingsnorth's electrical speech, invoking Providence to interpose in the settlement of the Irish difficulty. It was the one topic of conversation throughout dinner. And it was during that dinner that Angela for the first time really angered her father and raised a barrier between them that lasted until the day of his death.