“Is she—?” he said.
“Yes—Gabriel’s wife.”
John Strong was silent again for fully a minute. Then he asked Joan a single question.
“Was this a plant?”
His daughter looked him full in the face.
“No, father,” she said; “I did not know we should drive there till after we heard the death-bell tolling.”
“This is the truth?”
“Have I ever lied to you in my life?”
XLIII
THE morning after Zeus Gildersedge’s burial, John Strong walked the terrace before Saltire Hall, a man much troubled within himself. Sentiment had always seemed so doubtful a virtue to the tea-merchant that he had for years regarded any such ebullition of the soul with intense suspicion. After a long talk with Judith the preceding night he had gone to bed in a mood so generous and pliant that his own daughter had been astonished at the sudden surrender of her father’s pride.