"Daisy, my child! Daisy," her father repeated, repenting already of his hasty remarks, "don't take it so seriously. Margaret," to his wife, "speak to her."
And Mrs. Trevannion, as pale almost as her daughter, drew the sheet of note-paper from the girl's unresisting hands, while her husband held out to her his own letter.
"Some complete mistake," she said, "some misplaced quixotry. Daisy, my own darling, do not take it so seriously. Your father will see him—you will, will you not, Hugh?" detecting the proud hesitation in her husband's face. "It is not as if we did not know him well, and all about him. Your father will find out, Daisy, and make it all right."
Mr. Trevannion did not contradict her, but murmured some consolatory words, and then the mother led Daisy away, and to a certain extent the girl allowed herself to be reassured.
"I will consult Keir if necessary," said the father when out of hearing of his daughter. "He is the natural person, both as our own connection and because he introduced Lingard, and thinks so highly of him. But first I will see Arthur alone. The fewer mixed up in such a case the better."
Mrs. Trevannion agreed. She was constitutionally sanguine, but a painful idea struck her as her husband spoke.
"Hugh," she said hesitatingly, "you don't think—it surely is not possible that his—that Arthur's brain is affected?"
"His brain—tut, nonsense! What a woman's idea!" replied Mr. Trevannion irritably. "Why, he is receiving compliments on every side, from the very highest quarters, too, on that article of his on the Capricorn Islands. Brain affected, indeed!"
And to a whisper of, "I was thinking of over-work," which followed him apologetically, he vouchsafed no reply.
Some intensely trying days passed. Mr. Trevannion's interview with his recalcitrant son-in-law-to-be, proved a complete failure. Nothing, absolutely nothing was to be "got out of the fellow," he told his wife in mingled anger and wretchedness, for the poor man was a devoted father. Arthur was gentleness itself, respectful, deferential even, to the man whose peculiarly disagreeable position he felt for inexpressibly. But he was as firm, as hard in his decision that all should be, must be, over between Miss Trevannion and himself, as if his own heart had suddenly turned to iron, as if he possessed no feelings at all. He grew white to the lips, with a terrible death-like whiteness, when he named her; he said with a quiet, deliberate emphasis, more impressive by far than any passionate declaration, that never, never while he lived, would he forgive himself for the trouble he had brought into her young life, but that he was powerless to do otherwise, he was absolutely without a choice. As to the reason for the breaking off of the engagement to be given to the world, he left it entirely in the Trevannions' own hands; he would contradict nothing they thought it best to say; but, if possible, he grew still whiter when his visitor from under his shaggy eyebrows glanced at him with a look of contempt while he replied cuttingly that he had no love of falsehood. For his part he would tell the truth, and in the end he believed it would be best for Daisy that all the world should know the way in which she had been treated.