was
repellent.

First of all there was that bad Tressilian blood--notoriously bad,
and never more flagrantly displayed than in the case of the late Ralph
Tressilian. It was impossible that Oliver should have escaped the taint
of it; nor could Sir John perceive any signs that he had done so. He
displayed the traditional Tressilian turbulence. He was passionate and
brutal, and the pirate's trade to which he had now set his hand was
of all trades the one for which he was by nature best equipped. He was
harsh and overbearing, impatient of correction and prone to trample
other men's feelings underfoot. Was this, he asked himself in all
honesty, a mate for Rosamund? Could he entrust her happiness to the care
of such a man? Assuredly he could not.

Therefore, being whole again, he went to remonstrate with her as he
accounted it his duty and as Master Peter had besought him. Yet knowing
the bias that had been his he was careful to understate rather than to
overstate his reasons.

"But, Sir John," she protested, "if every man is to be condemned for the
sins of his forbears, but few could escape condemnation, and wherever
shall you find me a husband deserving your approval?"

"His father...." began Sir John.

"Tell me not of his father, but of himself," she interrupted.

He frowned impatiently--they were sitting in that bower of hers above
the river.

"I was coming to 't," he answered, a thought testily, for these
interruptions which made him keep to the point robbed him of his best
arguments. "However, suffice it that many of his father's vicious
qualities he has inherited, as we see in his ways of life; that he has
not inherited others only the future can assure us."

"In other words," she mocked him, yet very seriously, "I am to wait
until he dies of old age to make quite sure that he has no such sins as
must render him an unfitting husband?"

"No, no," he cried. "Good lack! what a perverseness is thine!"

"The perverseness is your own, Sir John. I am but the mirror of it."

He shifted in his chair and grunted. "Be it so, then," he snapped. "We
will deal with the qualities that already he displays." And Sir John
enumerated them.

"But this is no more than your judgment of him--no more than what you
think him."

"'Tis what all the world thinks him."

"But I shall not marry a man for what others think of him, but for what
I think of him myself. And in my view you cruelly malign him. I discover
no such qualitie