She prided herself on having reduced shopping to a fine art, but to-day, somehow, she didn't get through as quickly as usual, and there was a number of items on her list still unticked when it was time to meet her father just outside his club at the top of the promenade.
Major Morton was the essence of punctuality. Meg flew to meet him, and found he had waited five minutes. He was not, however, upset, as might have been expected. He took her to his rooms in a quiet terrace behind the promenade and comfortably near his club. The sun-blinds were down outside his sitting-room windows, and the room seemed cool and pleasant.
Then it was that Meg discovered that her father was looking at her in quite a new way. Almost, in fact, as though he had never seen her before.
Was it her short hair? she wondered.
Yet that was not very noticeable under such a shady hat.
Major Morton had vigorously opposed the nursemaid scheme. To the sympathetic ladies who attended the same strictly evangelical church
of which he was a pillar, he confided that his only daughter did not care for "a quiet domestic life." It was a grief to him—but, after all, parents are shelved nowadays; every girl wants to "live her own life," and he would be the last man to stand in the way of his child's happiness. The ladies felt very sorry for Major Morton and indignant with the hard-hearted, unfilial Meg. They did not realise that had Meg lived with her father—in rooms—and earned nothing, the Major's delicate digestion might occasionally have suffered, and Meg would undoubtedly have been half-starved.
To-day, however, he was more hopeful about Meg than he had been for a long time. Since the Trent episode he had ceased even to imagine her possible marriage. By her own headstrong folly she had ruined all her chances. "The weariful rich" who had got her the post did not spare him this aspect of her deplorable conduct. To-day, however, there was a rift in these dark clouds of consequence.
Captain Middleton—he only knows how—had persuaded Major Morton to go with him to see the horse, had asked his quite useless advice, and had subtly and insidiously conveyed to the Major, without one single incriminating sentence, a very clear idea as to his own feelings for the Major's daughter.
Major Morton felt cheered.