And so he came, in time, to giving his attention to Dorothea.  She, too, bore the impress of Diane; and as she bore it more markedly than the inanimate things around, it caused him the greater pain.  He could forbid her to hold intercourse with Diane, and to speak of her; but he could not control the blending of French and Irish intonations her voice had caught, or the gestures into which she slipped through youth’s mimetic instinct.  In happier days he had been amused to note the degree to which Dorothea had become the unconscious copy of Diane; but now this constant reproduction of her ways was torture.  Telling himself that it was not the child’s fault, he bore it at first with what self-restraint he could; but as solitude encouraged brooding thoughts, he found, as the summer wore on, that his stock of patience was running low.  There were times when some chance sentence or imitated bit of mannerism on Dorothea’s part almost drew from him that which in tragedy would be a cry, but which in our smaller life becomes the hasty or exasperated word.

In these circumstances the explosion was bound to come; and one day it produced itself unexpectedly, and about nothing.  Thinking of it afterward Derek was unable to say why it should have taken place then more than at any other time.  He was standing on the lawn, noting with savage complacency that the bit by which he had enlarged it, at Diane’s prompting, had grown up again, in luxuriant grass, when Dorothea descended the steps of the Georgian brick house, behind him.

“Would you be afther wantin’ me to-day?” she called out, using the Irish expression Diane affected in moments of fun.

“Dorothea,” he cried, sharply, wheeling round on her, “drop that idiotic way of speaking.  If you think it’s amusing, you’re mistaken.  You can’t even do it properly.”

The words were no sooner out than he regretted them, but it was too late to take them back.  Moreover, when a man, nervously suffering, has once wounded the feelings of one he loves, it is not infrequently his instinct to go on and wound them again.

“We have enough of that sort of language from the servants and the stable-boys.  Be good enough in future to use your mother-tongue.”

Standing where his words had stopped her, a few yards away, she looked up at him with the clear gaze of astonishment; but the slight shrug of the shoulders before she spoke was also a trick caught from Diane, and not calculated to allay his annoyance.

“Very well, father,” she answered, with a quietness indicating judgment held in reserve, “I won’t do it again.  I only meant to ask you if you want me for anything in particular to-day; otherwise I shall go over and lunch at the Thoroughgoods’.”

“The Thoroughgoods’ again?  Can’t you get through a day without going there?”

“I suppose I could if it was necessary; but it isn’t.”

“I think it is.  You’ll do well not to wear out your welcome anywhere.”