Had the dalesmen known his daily martyrdom, he might have gained them; but his pride and his loyalty pushed him back behind barred doors. And what nobody yet had ever divined, this new niece of his knew before she had been twenty-four hours under his roof.
It made him hate her. The first time her grave, tranquil eyes rested upon her aunt, he felt that she understood and despised her. Then that same limpid gaze—direct, keen, pure—travelled to him, the man who was the life-companion of such a woman. He could feel her thought probing him, wondering at him, pitying him. He had not at first thought her like his sister, the dead Melicent to whom he had been sincerely attached. But when he encountered that wonderful glance, he saw the likeness so strongly that he afterwards never forgot it—was never able to look at the younger Melicent without thinking of her more beautiful, radiant mother, who had followed the man she loved into the wilderness.
But the very likeness embittered him. He had always nursed a grudge against his wilful sister—a half-contemptuous grudge, as against one who had stepped outside the pale of conventions held so sacred by his own wife. Was her young daughter to come from the wilds to sit in judgment upon this exemplary pair, who found the straitest paths of domestic dulness wide enough for them to walk in? He almost wished that Melicent would do something that should justify him in his dislike of her.
He was brooding over it alone in his study, where he wrote with much care his cold, dry, unreal sermons, when his wife's head appeared round the door, with her usual coy smile.
"Quite unsuccessful, my darling boy," she said. "She defies me openly; and yet I flatter myself I was most diplomatic."
Like many essentially cold-hearted people, Mrs. Cooper was prodigal of endearing epithets. Her husband, on principle, never used any.
"A direct command would, I imagine, have met the case better than diplomacy," he said, in his cold, collected tones. "What did she say? Was she rude?"
"Well, not exactly. She said it would be a breach of confidence to show her letter, but that she would see that the young man wrote no more. She also said that she insists upon her right to correspond with her guardian without the letters being overlooked. Rather a shocking way to talk to me, wasn't it? But we must be very forgiving at first, I see that, and make very big allowances for the poor darling! The guardian himself seems to be quite young, and unmarried. Why did not poor Arnold appoint you guardian? As it is, she evidently thinks we have no authority."
He sat, with a mind oddly divided between dislike for the girl who defied him, and a sneaking satisfaction that Minna had been routed for once—by his sister's child!
"However," said his wife, secure as ever in her own infallibility, "we shall manage her all right in the end. The example of our girls will be invaluable. It is best to put the matter aside for the present, and let her settle down."