“Oh, father, do you really mean me to go?”
“We will come to that presently; let me finish what I was saying. I was fool enough to engage myself to a beautiful girl, knowing her to be unsuitable in every way for a poor man’s wife, and I dare say I should have persisted in my blindness to the bitter end, if I had not been jilted by the young lady.”
“My dear father!”
“My dear little Betty, please don’t speak in that pitying tone; it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I dare say I had a bad time of it; young men are such fools; but I soon met your mother, and she healed all wounds; but if Eleanor Sartoris treated me badly, she met with her punishment. The man she married was a worthless sort of a fellow; he is dead, so I need not mind saying so now. He was handsome enough and had all the accomplishments that please women, but he could not speak the truth. I never knew a man who could lie so freely, and in other respects he was equally faulty, but Eleanor was infatuated, and she would marry him against the advice of her friends, and the first thing she found out was that he had deceived her on one point. She knew that he had married when almost a boy, and his wife had been long dead, but he kept from her that he had a son living. His excuse was that he had heard her say that nothing would induce her to undertake the duties of a stepmother, and that he feared a refusal on account of Richard. In this he had overreached himself; she never forgave the deception, and she barely tolerated the poor boy. I am afraid, from what I heard, that their short married life was not a happy one. Eleanor had a proud, jealous temper, but she was truthful by nature, and nothing was so odious in her eyes as falsehood and deceit. I can feel sorry for her, for no woman could respect a character like Sefton’s, but I have always blamed her for her hardness to her stepson. His father doted on him, and Richard was the chief subject of their dissension on his death bed. He begged his wife to be kinder to the boy, but I do not know if this appeal softened her. The property belongs, of course, to her stepson, and in a sense she and her daughter are dependent on him, but it is not a united household. I know very little about the young man, except that he is industrious and fond of out-of-door pursuits, and farms his own estate; but I hear he is a little clownish in appearance. Now we are stopping, because I have a patient to see here, but I shall not be ten minutes, and we will resume our conversation presently.”
CHAPTER VI.
LITTLE MISS MUCH-AFRAID.
Bessie had plenty of food for meditation while Dr. Lambert paid his visit to his patient, and he found her apparently absorbed in a brown study when he returned to the carriage.
“Father dear,” she said, rousing herself, as he placed himself beside her, “I have been thinking over all you have told me, and I cannot help wondering why you wish me to visit Mrs. Sefton, when she treated you so badly.”
Dr. Lambert was silent for a minute; the question was not an easy one to answer. His wife had said the very same thing to him the previous evening: