The Squire's Daughter

by Silas K. Hocking

The question of bail was not mentioned, and Ralph went back to his cell to meditate once more on the tender mercies of the rich and the justice of the strong.

Sir John returned to his home very well pleased with the result of the morning's proceedings. The decision of the magistrates seemed a compliment to himself. To make it an Assize case indicated a due appreciation of his position and importance.

Also he was pleased because he believed the decision would completely destroy any romantic attachment that Dorothy might cherish for the accused. It had come to his knowledge that at the very time Mr. Tregonning was at his bedside taking his depositions, she was at the cottage of the Penlogans interviewing the accused himself. This knowledge had made Sir John more angry than he had been for a very long time. It was not merely the indiscretion that angered him, it was what the indiscretion implied.

However, he believed that the decision of the magistrates would put an end to all this nonsense, and that in the revulsion of feeling Lord Probus would again have his opportunity.

Dorothy asked him the result of the trial on his return, and when he told her she made no reply whatever. Neither did he enlarge on the matter. He concluded that it would be the wiser policy to let the simple facts of the case make their own impression. Women, he knew, were proverbially stubborn, and not always reasonable, while the more they were opposed, the more doggedly determined they became.

Such fears and suspicions as he had he wisely kept to himself. Dorothy was only a foolish girl, who would grow wiser with time. The teaching of experience and the pressure of circumstances would in the end, he believed, compel her to go the way he wished her to take. In the meanwhile, his cue was to watch and wait, and not too obtrusively show his hand.

Dorothy was as reticent on the matter as her father. That she had become keenly interested in the fate of Ralph Penlogan she did not attempt to hide from herself. That a cruel wrong had been done to him she honestly believed. That her sympathies went out to him in his undeserved sufferings was a fact she had no wish to dispute, and that in some way he had influenced her in her decision not to marry Lord Probus was also, to her own mind, too patent to be contested.

But she saw no danger in any of these simple facts. The idea of being in love with a small working farmer's son did not enter her head. She belonged to a different world socially, and such a proposition would not occur to her. But social position could not prevent her admiring good looks, and physical strength, and manly ways, and a generous disposition, when they were brought under her notice.

On the day following the decision of the magistrates she read a full account of the proceedings in the local newspaper, and for the first time was made aware of the fact that it was not Lord St. Goram who had so unmercifully oppressed the Penlogans, but her own father.

For a few minutes she felt quite stunned.