"
"So!"
The ejaculation came after a moment of intense silence--a silence
during which she seemed to discern the sturdiness of years drop
slowly away from him.
"So that is the explanation which people give to my desire for
retirement and a life of contemplation. Well," he slowly added,
with the halting utterance of one to whom each word is an effort,
"I can see some justification for their conclusions now. I have
been too self-centred, and too short-sighted to recognise my own
folly. I might have known that anything out of the common course
rouses a curiosity which supplies its own explanation at any cost
to propriety or respect. I have courted my own doom. I am the
victim of my own mistake. But," he continued, with a flash of his
old fire which made him a dignified figure again, "I'm not going
to cringe because I have lost ground in the first skirmish. I come
of fighting blood. Oliver's reputation shall not suffer long,
whatever I may have done in my parental confidence to endanger it.
I have not spent ten years at the bar, and fifteen on the bench
for nothing. Let the people look to it! I will stand by my own."
He had as completely forgotten her as if she had never existed.
John Scoville, his widow, even the child bowed under troubles not
unlike his own, had faded alike from his consciousness. But the
generous Deborah felt no resentment at the determination which
would only press her and hers deeper into contumely. She had seen
the father in the man for the first time, and her whole heart
went out in passionate sympathy which blinded her to everything
but her present duty.
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