The next morning, soon after breakfast, Sergeant Wilks was ushered into the study, where the squire was expecting him.  The two men had had hard thoughts of each other, for many years.  The squire regarded the sergeant as a man who had inveigled his son into marrying his daughter, while the sergeant regarded the squire as a heartless and unnatural father, who had left his son to die alone among strangers.  The conversation with John Petersham had taught the sergeant that he had wronged the squire, by his estimate of him, and that he was to be pitied rather than blamed in the matter.  The squire, on his part, was grateful to the sergeant for the care he had bestowed upon the child, and for restoring her to him, and was inclined, indeed, at the moment, to a universal goodwill to all men.

The sergeant was pale, but self possessed and quiet; while the squire, moved, by the events of the night before, out of the silent reserve in which he had, for years, enveloped himself, was agitated and nervous.  He was the first to speak.

“Mr. Wilks,” he said.  “I have to give you my heartfelt thanks, for having restored my granddaughter to me—­the more so as I know, from what she has said, how great a sacrifice you must be making.  John has been telling me of his conversation with you, and you have learned, from him, that I was not so wholly heartless and unnatural a father as you must have thought me; deeply as I blame myself, and shall always blame myself, in the matter.”

“Yes,” the sergeant said.  “I have learned that I have misread you.  Had it not been so, I should have brought the child to you long ago—­should never have taken her away, indeed.  Perhaps we have both misjudged each other.”

“I fear that we have,” the squire said, remembering the letters he wrote to his son, in his anger, denouncing the sergeant in violent language.

“It does not matter, now,” the sergeant went on quietly; “but, as I do not wish Aggie ever to come to think ill of me, in the future, it is better to set it right.

“When I left the army, I had saved enough money to furnish a house, and I took one at Southampton, and set up taking lodgers there.  I had my pension, and lived well until my wife died—­a year before your son came down, from London, with another gentleman, and took my rooms.  My daughter was seventeen when her mother died, and she took to managing the house.  I was careful of her, and gave her orders that, on no account, was she ever to go into the lodgers’ rooms.  I waited on them, myself.

“How your son first saw her, and got to speak to her, I don’t know; but I am not surprised that, when he did, he loved her, for there was no prettier or sweeter girl in Hampshire.  They took the rooms, first, only for a fortnight, then the other gentleman went away, and your son stayed on.