Mr. Bonamy, pursing up his lips to keep back the smile of complacency which would force its way, let his eyes rove round the room. “Yes,” he said, “I do not mind saying here that I am rather flattered. Of course I should not say as much out of doors.”
“Oh, papa, I am so glad,” she cried, rising. An unwonted softness in her tone touched and pleased him.
“Yes,” he continued, “I am to go over to the park to-morrow to lunch with him and talk over matters. He told me something else which will astonish you. He has behaved very handsomely to Mr. Lindo. It seems he saw him early this morning, after having an interview with the archdeacon, and offered him the living of Pocklington, in Oxfordshire—worth, I believe, about five hundred a year. He is going to give the vicar of Pocklington the rectory here.”
Kate’s face was scarlet. “But I thought—I understood,” she stammered, “that Mr. Clode was to be rector here?”
“Not at all,” said Mr. Bonamy, with some asperity. “The whole thing was settled before ten o’clock this morning. Mary told me at the door that Lindo had been here since, so I supposed he had told you something about it.”
“He did not tell me a word of it!” Kate answered impulsively, the generous trick her lover had played breaking in upon her mind in all its fulness. “Not a word of it! But papa”—with a pause and then a rush of words—“he asked me to be his wife, and I—I told him I would.”
For a moment Mr. Bonamy stared at his daughter as if he thought she had lost her wits. Probably since his boyhood he had never been so much astonished. “I was talking of Mr. Lindo,” he said at length, speaking with laborious clearness. “You are referring to your cousin, I fancy.”
“No,” Kate said, striving with her happy confusion. “I mean Mr. Lindo, papa.”
“Indeed! indeed!” Mr. Bonamy answered after another pause, speaking still more slowly, and gazing at her as if he had never seen her before, nor anything at all like her. “You have a good deal surprised me. And I am not easily surprised, I think. Not easily, I think.”
“But you are not angry with me, papa?” she murmured rather tearfully.