"Thanks," he replied. "You are most kind, most indulgent to me, Miss Verity.—Superfluous, I would say, to assure you that my colleague adopted this deplorable course without my knowledge or sanction. He sprang it on me like a bomb-shell. As a Christian my conscience, as a gentleman my sense of fair play, condemns his action."
"Yes—yes—I sympathize.—I am convinced you are incapable of any indiscretion, any unkindness, in the pulpit or out of it. But why, my dear Canon, apologize to us? How can this unfortunate sermon affect me or my niece? How can the scandal you hint at in any respect concern us?"
"Because," he began, that mottling of purple increasingly deforming his amiable face.—And there words failed him, incontinently he stuck. He detested strong language, but—heavens and earth—how could he put it to her, as she gazed at him with startled, candid eyes, innocent of guile as those of a babe? Only too certainly no word had reached her of the truth. The good man groaned in spirit for, like Patch, he found himself in a place of quite unexampled tightness, and with no hope of shunting the immense discomfort of it on to alien shoulders such as had been granted the happier Patch.
"Because," he began again, only to suffer renewed agony of wordlessness.
In desperation he shifted his ground.
"You have heard, perhaps, that your niece, Miss Damaris, left the church before the conclusion of the sermon? I do not blame her"—
He waved a fatherly hand. Miss Verity acquiesced.
"Or rather was led out by—by Captain Faircloth—a young officer in the mercantile marine, whose abilities and successful advance in his profession this village has every reason to respect."
He broke off.
"Let us walk on towards The Hard. Pray let us walk on.—Has no rumour ever reached you, Miss Verity, regarding this young man?"
The wildest ideas flitted through Miss Felicia's brain.