“Oh! father, how can you?” ejaculated Angela, in an agony of shame.

“You idiot, I won’t want you to marry him; I only want you to make a fool of him.  Surely, being of the sex you are, you won’t find that an uncongenial occupation.”

Angela’s blushes had given away to pallor now, and she answered with cold contempt: 

“I don’t think you quite understand what a girl feels—­at least, what I feel, for I know no other girls.  Perhaps it would be useless for me to try to explain.  I had rather go blind than use my eyes for such a shameful purpose.”

“Angela,” said her father, with as much temper as he ever showed now, “let me tell you that you are a silly fool; you are more, you are an encumbrance.  Your birth,” he added, bitterly, “robbed me of your mother, and the fact of your being a girl deprived our branch of the family of their rights.  Now that you have grown up, you prefer to gratify your whims rather than help me to realize the object of my life by a simple course of action that could do no one any harm.  I never asked you to commit yourself in any way.  Well, well, it is what I must expect.  We have not seen much of each other heretofore, and perhaps the less we meet in the future the better.”

“You have no right to talk to me so,” she answered, with flashing eyes, “though I am your daughter, and it is cowardly to reproach me with my birth, my sex, and my dependence.  Am I responsible for any of these things?  But I will not burden you long.  And as to what you wanted me to do, and think such a little of, I ask you, is it what my poor mother would have wished her daughter——­”

Here Philip abruptly rose, and left the room and the house.

“She is as like her mother as possible,” he mused, as soon as he was clear of the house.  “It might have been Hilda herself, only she is twice as beautiful as Hilda was.  I shall have another bad night after this, I know I shall.  I must get rid of that girl somehow, I cannot bear her about me; she is a daily reminder of things I dare not remember, and whenever she stares at me with those great eyes of hers, I feel as though she were looking through me.  I wonder if she knows the story of Maria Lee!”

And then dismissing, or trying to dismiss, the matter from his mind, he took his way across the fields to Isleworth Hall, a large white brick mansion in the Queen Anne style, about two miles distant from the Abbey, and, on arrival, asked for his cousin George, and was at once shown into that gentleman’s presence.

Years had told upon George more than they had upon Philip, and, though there were no touches of grey in the flaming red of his hair, the bloodshot eyes, and the puckered crowsfeet beneath them, to say nothing of the slight but constant trembling of the hand, all showed that he was a man well on in middle-life, and who had lived every day of it.  Time, too, had made the face more intensely unpleasant and vulgar-looking than ever.  Such Caresfoot characteristics as it possessed were, year by year, giving place, in an increasingly greater degree, to the kitchen-maid strain introduced by the mother.  In short, George Caresfoot did not even look a gentleman, whereas Philip certainly did.