Sir Simon threw back his head and roared.
“Really, Bourbonais, you’re too bad! ’Pon my honor you are. To imagine that a man of eight-and-twenty waits for a hint to fall in love when he has the temptation and the opportunity! But you know no more about it than the man in the moon. You live in the clouds.”
“I have lived in them perhaps too long,” replied Raymond, humbly and with a pang of self-reproach. “I should have been more watchful where my child was concerned; but I fancied that her poverty, which hitherto has cut her off from the enjoyments of her age, precluded all possibility of marriage—at least until the fruit of my toil should have given her a right to think of it. It seems I was mistaken.”
“And are you sorry for it?”
Raymond walked to the window, and looked out for a moment before he answered.
“Admitting that the immense disparity in fortune were not an insuperable barrier, there is another that nothing would overcome in Franceline’s eyes—he is not a Catholic.”
“Yes, he is. At least he ought to be; his mother was a Catholic, and he was brought up one.
“Strange that he should not have mentioned that to me!” said Raymond, musing; “but then how is it that we did not see him in church last Sunday?”
“Hem!… I’m not quite sure that he went; it was my fault. I kept them both up till the small hours of the morning talking over business, and so on,” said Sir Simon, throwing the mantle of friendship over Clide’s delinquency. “You know it does not do to draw the rein too tight with a young fellow. He’s been so much abroad, and unhappy, and that sort of thing, you see; but a wife would bring him all right again, and keep him up to the collar.”
“Franceline would attach paramount importance to that, Harness,” said the father, with a certain accent of humility; he did not dare insist on it in his own name.