not angrily, but as if not quite able to grasp what had
been told him. He had cast his eyes down.

There was silence for a moment.

'I have chosen the earliest moment for telling you of this,' Wilfrid
continued, rather hurriedly. 'It was of course better to leave it till
Miss Hood had gone.'

On the father's face displeasure had succeeded to mere astonishment.

'You could have told me few things that I should be so sorry to hear,'
were his first words, delivered in an undertone and with grave
precision.

'Surely that does not express your better thought,' said Wilfrid, to
whom a hint of opposition at once gave the firmness he had lacked.

'It expresses my very natural thought. In the first place, it is not
pleasant to know that clandestine proceedings of this kind have been
going on under my roof. I have no wish to say anything disrespectful of
Miss Hood, but I am disposed to think that she has mistaken her
vocation; such talents for dissimulation would surely have pointed to--'

Mr. Athel had two ways of expressing displeasure. Where ceremony was
wholly unnecessary, he gave vent to his feelings in an outburst of
hearty English wrath, not coarsely, for his instincts were invariably
those of a gentleman, but in the cultivated autocratic tone; an
offending. groom, for instance, did not care to incur reproof a second
time. Where this mode of utterance was out of place, he was apt to have
recourse to a somewhat too elaborate irony, to involve himself in
phrases which ultimately led to awkward hesitations, with the effect
that he grew more heated by embarrassment. Had he been allowed to
proceed, he would at present have illustrated this failing, for he had
begun with extreme deliberation, smoothing the open pages with his right
hand, rounding his words, reddening a little in the face. But Wilfrid
interposed.

'I must not let you speak or think of Miss Hood so mistakenly,' he said
firmly, but without unbecoming self-assertion. 'She could not possibly
have behaved with more reserve to me than she did until, three days ago,
I myself gave a new colour to our relations. The outward propriety which
you admit has been perfectly genuine; if there is any blame in the
matter--and how can there be any?--it rests solely upon me. I dare say
you remember my going out to fetch the "Spectator," after Miss Redwing
had been singing to us. By chance I met Miss Hood in the garden. I was
led to say something to her which made a longer i