“My dear, there is nothing to be jealous of. I thought that you were taking nicely to the plan laid out for you.”
“The plan that will lay me out, papa. But will you tell me one thing?”
“Yes, my dear child, a hundred things; if you will only ask them quietly.”
“I am not making any noise, papa; it is only that my collar touched my throat. But what I want to know is this. If anything should happen to me, as they say; if I should drop out of everybody’s way, could the money be got that you are all so steadfastly set upon getting? Could the honour of the family be set up, and poor Hilary get restored, and well, and the Lorraines go on for ever? Why don’t you answer me, papa? My question is a very simple one. What I have a right to ask is this—am I, for some inscrutable reason (which I have had nothing to do with), the stumbling-block—the fatal obstacle to the honour and the life of the family?”
“Alice, I never knew you talk like this, and I never saw you look so. Why, your cheeks are perfectly burning! Come here, and let me feel them.”
“Thank you, papa; they will do very well. But will you just answer my question? Am I the fatal—am I the deathblow to the honour and life of our lineage?”
Sir Roland Lorraine was by no means pleased with this curt mode of putting things. He greatly preferred, at his time of life, the rounding off and softening of affairs that are too dramatic. He loved his beautiful daughter more than anything else on the face of the earth; he knew how noble her nature was, and he often thought that she took a more lofty view of the world than human nature in the end would justify. But still he must not give way to that.
“Alice,” he said, “I can scarcely see why you should so disturb yourself. There are many things always to be thought of—more than one has time for.”
“To be sure, papa; I know all that; and I hate to see you worried. But I think that you might try to tell me whether I am right or not.”
“My darling, you are never wrong. Only things appear to you in a stronger light than they do to me. Of course, because you are younger and get into a hurry about many things that ought to be more dwelt upon. It is true that your life is interposed, through the command of your grandmother and the subtlety of the lawyers, between poor Hilary and the money that might have been raised to save him.”