"No: why should I? I confess it honestly, I do not like her. The daughter of such a woman as her mother was; up to fifteen years of age a perfect savage; a heathen with a temper that makes me shudder when I think of it; capable of any crime. No, don't look shocked, Edgar: I am sure of it. That girl could commit murder; and I verily believe that she did push Fina into the water, as the child says, and that if Josephine had not got there in time she would have let her drown. And if I think all this, how can I like her?"
"No, if you think all this, as you say, you cannot like her," replied Edgar coldly. "I don't happen to agree with you, however, and I think your assumptions monstrous."
"You are not the first man blinded by a pair of dark eyes, Edgar," said Adelaide with becoming mournfulness. "It makes me sorry to see such a mind as yours dazzled out of its better sense, but you will perhaps come right in time. At all events, Josephine's marriage with Mr. Dundas will give you a kind of fatherly relation with Leam that may show you the truth of what I say."
"Fatherly relation! what rubbish!" cried Edgar, irritated out of his politeness.
Adelaide smiled. "Well, you would be rather a young father for her," she answered. "Still, the character of the relation will be, as I say, fatherly."
Edgar laughed impatiently.
"Society will accept it in that light," said Adelaide gravely, glad to erect even this barrier of shadows between the man of her choice and the girl whom she both dreaded and disliked.
And she was right in her supposition. Brother and sister marrying daughter and father would not be well received in a narrow society like North Aston, where the restrictions of law and elemental morality were supplemented by an adventitious code of denial which put Nature into a strait waistcoat and shackled freedom of action and opinion with chains and bands of iron. Perhaps it was some such thought as this on his own part that made Edgar profess himself disgusted with this marriage, and declare loudly that Sebastian Dundas was not worthy of such a girl as Josephine. His hearers smiled in their sleeves when he said so, and thought that Josephine Harrowby, thirty-five years of age, fat and freckled, was not so far out in her running to have got at last—they always put in "at last"—the owner of Ford House. It was more than she might have expected, looking at things all round; and Edgar was as unreasonable as proud men always are. With the redundancy of women as we have it in England, happy the head of the house who can get rid of his superfluous petticoats anyhow in honor and sufficiency. This was the verdict of society on the affair—the two extremities of the line wherefrom the same fact was viewed.
As for Josephine herself, dear soul! she was supremely happy. It was almost worth while to have waited so long, she thought, to have such an exquisite reward at last. She went back ten years in her life, and grew quite girlish and fresh-looking, and what was wanting in romance on Sebastian's part was made up in devotion and adoration on hers.
Sebastian himself took pleasure in her happiness, her adoration, the supreme content of her rewarded love. It made him glad to think that he had given so good a creature so much happiness; and he warmed his soul at his rekindled ashes as a philosophic widower generally knows how.