“Well,” said Markham, with a long-drawn breath, “that’s over, Con; and better than might have been expected.”
“Better! Do you call that better? I should say almost as bad as could be. Why didn’t you stand up to him and have it out?”
“My dear, he always cows me a little,” said Markham. “I remember times when I stood up to him, as you say, with that idiotcy of youth in which you are so strong, Con; but I think I generally came off second-best. Our respected papa has a great gift of language when he likes.”
“He does not like now, he is too old; he has given up that sort of thing. Ask Frances. She thinks him the mildest of pious fathers.”
“If you please,” said the little voice of Frances out of the gloom, with a little quiver in it, “I wish you would not speak about papa so, before me. It is perhaps quite right of you, who have no feeling for him, or don’t know him very well; but with me it is quite different. Whether you are right or wrong, I cannot have it, please.”
“The little thing is quite right, Con,” said Markham. “I beg your pardon, little Fan. I have a great respect for papa, though he has none for me. Too old! He is not so old as I am, and a much more estimable member of society. He is not old enough—that is the worst of it—for you and me.”
“I am not going to encourage her in her nonsense,” said Constance, “as if one’s father or mother was something sacred, as if they were not just human beings like ourselves. But apart from that, as I have told Frances, I think very well of papa.”
CHAPTER XVI.
There was no more said for a day or two about the journey. But that it was to take place, that Markham was waiting till his step-sister was ready, and that Frances was making her preparations to go, nobody any longer attempted to ignore. Waring himself had gone so far in his recognition of the inevitable as to give Frances money to provide for the necessities of the journey. “You will want things,” he said. “I don’t wish it to be thought that I kept you like a little beggar.”
“I am not like a little beggar, papa,” cried Frances, with an indignation which scarcely any of the more serious grievances of her life had called forth. She had always supposed him to be pleased with the British neatness, the modest, girlish costumes which she had procured for herself by instinct, and which made this girl, who knew nothing of England, so characteristically an English girl. This proof of the man’s ignorance—which Frances ignorantly supposed to mean entire indifference to her appearance—went to her heart. “And it is impossible to get things here,” she added, with her usual anxious penitence for her impatience.