“My dear child,” said her uncle, kindly patting the hand she had involuntarily laid on his arm, “do not plead so piteously as if I were constituting myself a judge over you. What you say seems to me to have been the principal point—the only point—on which Arthur is really to blame. Why did he not tell you that he no longer felt any liking for the service?”
“Ah,” said Lettice, “I fear that was my influence again. I think he was afraid of telling it, afraid of how I should take it.”
“But that was cowardice, moral cowardice,” for he felt that Lettice winced at the strong, expression. “I am very plain-spoken, Lettice,” he added, though looking at her so kindly that the words had no harshness in them. “When I see Arthur, I shall try to make him understand where he was wrong, and I think he will agree with me. But he has got false notions on other points, I see. What is all this about independence, repaying what he would never have used had he understood the whole, working in the hopes of some day doing so, etcetera?”
“It was what Godfrey told us,” said Lettice in a low voice, “about—about all you had done and risked to save our money.”
For the first time Mr Morison’s face darkened, and Lettice realised that, though gentle, he could also make his anger felt.
“Auriol!” he exclaimed. “How could he have so represented, or misrepresented, things? There was no need for anything to be said about it. I, very reluctantly, gave him leave to tell you, or your mother rather, that I had done what I could at a critical time. But it was solely to show her how ready, how eager I was to be of use. But as to its calling forth any other feeling—”
“Gratitude, at least,” said Lettice timidly.
“No, not gratitude even. It was nothing but natural, purely and thoroughly natural. And to think of Auriol’s having stated it so as to give you any painful sense of obligation—how can he have done so?”
Lettice hesitated. Her cup of self-abasement was to be drunk to the dregs, it seemed. She turned round, with a look of determination on her face.
“Uncle Ingram,” she began, and in the pleasure of hearing himself so addressed by her, Mr Morison’s face relaxed, “I will try to explain all; I will not spare myself. It was not Mr Auriol’s fault. He did tell it us just as you would have wished. He wanted to soften me, to make me reasonable. But I repelled him. I made him angry. I lost my temper, and made him, a little, I think, lose his, too,”—and Lettice was too absorbed by her own recital to see what perhaps it was as well she did not observe, a slight smile of amusement which here crossed her uncle’s face—“and then he said what was true—that we owed you gratitude we could never repay. It is true, Uncle Ingram, and now I don’t mind it. But, don’t you see, that while we—I—was resisting you, refusing to count you our uncle, it was a painful obligation?”