The old man’s hand was raised to shade his eyes; he could not quite trust his face to hide his feelings now, but he said in a voice which he tried to make indifferent,—
“I suppose it is to be her or nobody. Is that what you would say to me?”
George made no answer to this.
“I shall never ask her without your full and free consent.”
Mr Dawson’s hand fell and he turned sharply upon him. “And what about her feelings, if that is to be the way?”
“I have never given her a word or a look that a brother might not give to a sister. But I cannot but hope—” added George with a sudden light in his eye, and a rush of boyish colour to his face. “And I thought you liked Marion, father?”
“Like her?” said his father rising. “George, man, go in God’s name and bring her home. She shall be to me like my own daughter. And the sooner the better.”
So George went to London and won his bride—“too easily,” her mother said. Indeed George had more trouble to win the mother than the daughter. It was to the mother he went first.
As for her, unless she could blot out altogether the remembrance of the sorrow and the hard thoughts of all the past, how could she consent to give her child to him?
“And would it not be well to blot them out?” said George.