He made a movement with his other arm as if restraining himself from shaking an indignant fist at the universe; and she never even attempted to look at him. His voice sounded strangely, incredibly lifeless in comparison with these tempestuous accents that in the broad fields, in the dark garden had seemed to shake the very earth under her weary and hopeless feet.
She regretted them. Hearing the sigh which escaped her Anthony instead of shaking his fist at the universe began to pat her hand resting on his arm and then desisted, suddenly, as though he had burnt himself. Then after a silence:
“You will have to go by yourself to-morrow. I . . . No, I think I mustn’t come. Better not. What you two will have to say to each other—”
She interrupted him quickly:
“Father is an innocent man. He was cruelly wronged.”
“Yes. That’s why,” Anthony insisted earnestly. “And you are the only human being that can make it up to him. You alone must reconcile him with the world if anything can. But of course you shall. You’ll have to find words. Oh you’ll know. And then the sight of you, alone, would soothe—”
“He’s the gentlest of men,” she interrupted again.
Anthony shook his head. “It would take no end of generosity, no end of gentleness to forgive such a dead set. For my part I would have liked better to have been killed and done with at once. It could not have been worse for you—and I suppose it was of you that he was thinking most while those infernal lawyers were badgering him in court. Of you. And now I think of it perhaps the sight of you may bring it all back to him. All these years, all these years—and you his child left alone in the world. I would have gone crazy. For even if he had done wrong—”
“But he hasn’t,” insisted Flora de Barral with a quite unexpected fierceness. “You mustn’t even suppose it. Haven’t you read the accounts of the trial?”
“I am not supposing anything,” Anthony defended himself. He just remembered hearing of the trial. He assured her that he was away from England, the second voyage of the Ferndale. He was crossing the Pacific from Australia at the time and didn’t see any papers for weeks and weeks. He interrupted himself to suggest: