‘You talk as if she were a skeleton in the closet!’
‘You DIDN’T talk—as if she were.’
‘I think she was, in a way, poor child. But the resurrection day hasn’t confounded me as I deserved. She’s a very good girl.’
‘If you had asked me to pick out your daughter—’
‘She would have been the last you would indicate! Quite so,’ I said. ‘She is like her father’s people. I can’t help that.’
‘I shouldn’t think you would if you could,’ Dacres remarked absently; but the sea air, perhaps, enabled me to digest his thoughtlessness with a smile.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I am just as well pleased. I think a resemblance to me would confuse me, often.’
There was a trace of scrutiny in Dacres’s glance. ‘Don’t you find yourself in sympathy with her?’ he asked.
‘My dear boy, I have seen her just twice in twenty-one years! You see, I’ve always stuck to John.’
‘But between mother and daughter—I may be old-fashioned, but I had an idea that there was an instinct that might be depended on.’