“Oh yes, often. Does your father like it as well as you do, Miss Waring? I should have supposed, for a man——”
“Yes,” said Frances, “I know what you mean. They say there is nothing to do. But my father is not a man to want to do anything. He is fond of books; he reads all day long, and then comes out into the loggia with his cigarette—and talks to me.”
“That sounds very pleasant,” said Sir Thomas with a smile, taking no notice of the involuntary quaver that had got into the girl’s voice. “But I wonder if perhaps he does not want a little variety, a little excitement? Excuse me for saying so. Men, you know, are not always so easily contented as the better half of creation; and then they are accustomed to larger duties, to more action, to public affairs.”
“I don’t think papa takes much interest in all that,” said Frances with an air of authority. “He has never cared for what was going on. The newspapers he sometimes will not open.”
“That is a great change. He used to be a hot politician in the old days.”
“Did you know my father?” she cried, turning upon him with a glow of sudden interest.
“I knew him very well—better than most people. I was one of those who felt the deepest regret——”
She stood gazing at him with her face lifted to him with so profound an interest and desire to know, that he stopped short, startled by the intensity of her look. “Miss Waring,” he said, “it is a very delicate subject to talk to their child upon.”
“Oh, I know it is. I don’t like to ask—and yet it seems as if I ought to know.” Frances was seized with one of those sudden impulses of confidence which sometimes make the young so indiscreet. If she had known Sir Thomas intimately, it would not have occurred to her; but as a stranger, he seemed safe. “No one has ever told me,” she added in the heat of this sudden overflow, “neither how it was or why it was—except Markham, who says it was his fault.”
“There were faults on all sides, I think,” said Sir Thomas. “There always are in such cases. No one person is able to carry out such a prodigious mistake. You must pardon me if I speak plainly. You are the only person whom I can ask about my old friend.”