Don Joaquin slightly elevated his eyebrows.
"I do not know," he said coldly, "how you can answer for what her mind is given to. I, at any rate, must have such thoughts on her account. I am not English. English parents may, perhaps, leave all such things to chance. We, of my people, are not so. To us it seems the most important of his duties for a father to trust to no chances, but arrange and provide for his daughter's settlement in life."
Here the old fellow paused, and having shot his bolt, pretended it had been a mere parenthesis in answer to an implied criticism.
"But," he continued, "I have wandered from what I was really explaining. I was telling that soon I should, in the natural course of things, be left here alone, as regards home companionship, unless I myself tried to find a mate, so I tried and I have succeeded."
Here he bowed with great majesty and some complacence, as if he might have added, "Though you, in your raw youthfulness and conceit, may have thought me too old a suitor to win a lovely bride."
Gore responded by the heartiest felicitations. "Sir," he added after a brief pause, "since it seems to me that you wish it, I will explain my own position. I can well afford to marry. And I would wish very much to marry. But there is only one lady whom I have ever met, whom I have now, or ever, felt that I would greatly desire to win for my wife."
So far Don Joaquin had listened with an absolutely expressionless countenance of polite attention, though he had never been more interested.
"The lady," Gore continued, "is your daughter."
(Here that lady's father relaxed the aloofness of his manner, and permitted himself a look of benign, though not eager, approval.)
"It may be," the young man went on, "that you have perceived my wishes...."