"Marjorie! What has Marjorie to do with it?"
Robin found himself suddenly in deep waters. He had plunged and found that he could not swim. This was the second mistake he had made in saying what he did not mean…. Again the courage of despair came to him, and he struck out further.
"I must tell you of that too, sir," he said. "Mistress Marjorie and I—"
He stopped, overwhelmed with shame. His father turned full round and stared at him.
"Go on, sir."
Robin seized his glass and emptied it.
"Well, sir. Mistress Marjorie and I love one another. We are but boy and girl, sir; we know that—"
Then his father laughed. It was laughter that was at once hearty and bitter; and, with it, came the closing of the open door in the boy's heart. As there came out, after it, sentence after sentence of scorn and contempt, the bolts, so to say, were shot and the key turned. It might all have been otherwise if the elder man had been kind, or if he had been sad or disappointed, or even if he had been merely angry; but the soreness and misery in the old man's heart—misery at his own acts and words, and at the outrage he was doing to his own conscience—turned his judgment bitter, and with that bitterness his son's heart shut tight against him.
"But boy and girl!" sneered the man. "A couple of blind puppies, I would say rather—you with your falcons and mare and your other toys, and the down on your chin, and your conscience; and she with her white face and her mother and her linen-parlour and her beads"—(his charity prevailed so far as to hinder him from more outspoken contempt)—"And you two babes have been prattling of conscience and prayers together—I make no doubt, and thinking yourselves Cecilies and Laurences and all the holy martyrs—and all this without a by-your-leave, I dare wager, from parent or father, and thinking yourselves man and wife; and you fondling her, and she too modest to be fondled, and—"
The plain truth struck him with sudden splendour, at least sufficiently strong to furnish him with a question.