The young man, holding his hat in his hand, wheeled and looked at his grandmother in utter amazement, startled, almost alarmed, by the violence of her tone and by the suddenness of the attack.
"I don't understand. I don't know in the least what you mean," he said honestly enough, and yet, even as he spoke, a glimmering consciousness came into his open face.
"Oh, yes, you do. You know perfectly well, but I'll put it plainer if you want me to," she went on, roughly, sneeringly.
Lynn reddened, putting up his hand with a gesture imposing silence. "Perhaps I do understand something of what you mean," he said hesitatingly, with the hesitation which every right-minded man feels at referring—however distantly—in any such connection to a girl whom he reveres. "And if I do understand anything of what you mean, you must allow me to tell you that there has been no philandering, nor any semblance of it."
"Then what do you call it?" she demanded, with even greater violence and roughness than before. "May I ask how you characterize this perpetual dawdling, all day and nearly all night, at the heels of a girl whose rank is hardly above that of a servant—a girl whom even the son of your father, or the grandson of your grandfather, could scarcely be fool or rake enough to think of—except as something to philander after."
She hurled the brutal words at him as she would have thrown stones in his face, far too furious to think or to care how they might hurt.
He recoiled, shocked, revolted, by the sight of such unrestrained anger in age. It seemed an incredibly monstrous thing. Then he stood still, looking at her with a cool courage which matched her flaming rage. He now moved farther away, but it was solely because he felt a sudden extreme repulsion.
"Pardon me," he said icily, moving still farther, still nearer the open door. "It is you who do not understand. There certainly is nothing that any one else can possibly have misunderstood. I have been scrupulously careful all along that there should not be. I have guarded every act, every word, every look—"
Old lady Gordon burst out laughing like a coarse old man deep in his cups.
"Oh ho!" she scoffed. "So that's how the matter stands, is it? How high-minded! How prudently virtuous! How perfectly Sidney's daughter must understand. How highly the girl must appreciate it. Of course she does understand and appreciate your prudence, your thought—of yourself. What woman wouldn't? Even a simpleton of a country girl must have been overcome by it. She can't help forgiving you for trying your best to make her fall in love with you, if you have been as steadfast—as you say you have—in warning her that you didn't mean to fall in love with her. How she must honor and admire you!" she taunted, with something masculine in her voice, and laughing again like a coarse old man.