“Then how—how did you learn about it?”
“She gave me the letter to read. We were at breakfast—her father and I—reading our papers, in such good spirits over the surrender of Kronje; it seems a year ago”—with a transient look of bewilderment—“and in she came, holding an open letter in her hand, and said, with that odd smile she sometimes puts on—I am always uneasy when I see that smile—‘There has sometimes been a little soreness about my keeping my correspondence to myself. Here is a letter that I invite you both to read,’ and she laid it down on the table before me!” The mother pauses, her face working.
“Well?” in a breathless sympathy.
“I just glanced at the signature, and saw it was his. But even then it never struck me—I did not put two and two together. Who could have imagined such a thing about her own child? And she had not mentioned his name for weeks.”
“No?”
“I read it!” pausing to gasp, “and then her father read it!”
“Yes?”
“I—I have nothing to say against it,” speaking with twitching lips. “It was everything that was honourable and gentlemanlike!”
A longer pause. Lavinia has put her elbows on the little Empire table that interposes its fragile elegance between her and her companion, and is digging her knuckles into the cheeks that are blazing with vicarious shame.
“He said that—yes, I had rather tell you—that he was inexpressibly touched; but that in his busy life there was no room for feelings of that sort; that he was old enough to be her father; and that he had thought it right to destroy her letter.”