“Going to take the old fellow to sea with them,” I said. “Well I really don’t see what else they could have done with him. You told your brother-in-law what you thought of it? I wonder how he took it.”
“Very improperly,” repeated Fyne. “His manner was offensive, derisive, from the first. I don’t mean he was actually rude in words. Hang it all, I am not a contemptible ass. But he was exulting at having got hold of a miserable girl.”
“It is pretty certain that she will be much less poor and miserable,” I murmured.
It looked as if the exultation of Captain Anthony had got on Fyne’s nerves. “I told the fellow very plainly that he was abominably selfish in this,” he affirmed unexpectedly.
“You did! Selfish!” I said rather taken aback. “But what if the girl thought that, on the contrary, he was most generous.”
“What do you know about it,” growled Fyne. The rents and slashes of his solemnity were closing up gradually but it was going to be a surly solemnity. “Generosity! I am disposed to give it another name. No. Not folly,” he shot out at me as though I had meant to interrupt him. “Still another. Something worse. I need not tell you what it is,” he added with grim meaning.
“Certainly. You needn’t—unless you like,” I said blankly. Little Fyne had never interested me so much since the beginning of the de Barral-Anthony affair when I first perceived possibilities in him. The possibilities of dull men are exciting because when they happen they suggest legendary cases of “possession,” not exactly by the devil but, anyhow, by a strange spirit.
“I told him it was a shame,” said Fyne. “Even if the girl did make eyes at him—but I think with you that she did not. Yes! A shame to take advantage of a girl’s—a distresses girl that does not love him in the least.”
“You think it’s so bad as that?” I said. “Because you know I don’t.”
“What can you think about it,” he retorted on me with a solemn stare. “I go by her letter to my wife.”