“Then you thought wrong,” her father retorted incautiously; “I did go there.”

“To begin with,” Julia suggested; “but you came across some one, and went on—­is that it?”

The Captain denied it, but he had not his wife’s and daughters’ gifts; his lies were always of the cowardly and uninspired kind that seldom serve any purpose.  Julia did not believe him, and set to work cross questioning him so that soon she knew what she wanted.  It seemed that her surmise was correct; he had met some one at the “Dog and Pheasant”; a veterinary surgeon who had come there to doctor a horse.  They had struck up an acquaintance—­the Captain had the family gift for that—­and the surgeon had asked him to come to his house on the other side of Halgrave.

When the information reached this point Julia said suavely, but with meaning:  “Perhaps you had better not go there again.”

“I shall certainly go when I choose,” Captain Polkington retorted; “I should like to know what is to prevent me and why I should not?”

Julia remembered his dignity.  “Shall we say because it is too far?” she suggested.

After that she dismissed the subject; she did not see any need to pursue it further; her father knew her wishes—­commands, perhaps, he called them—­all that was left for her to do was to see that he could not help fulfilling them, and that was not to be done by much talking any more than by little.  So she made no further comments on his doings and, to change the subject, told him she had bought some whisky in the town yesterday and he had better open the bottle at dinner time.

The Captain stared for a moment, but quickly recovered from his astonishment, though not because he recognised that a little whisky at home was part of a judicious system.  He merely thought that his daughter was going to treat him properly after all, and in spite of what had been lately said.  This idea was a little modified when he found that, though he drank the whisky, Julia kept the bottle under lock and key.

It also seemed that she found a way of enforcing her wishes, or at least preventing frequent transgressions of them, although, of course, she was prepared for occasional mishaps.  There really was nothing at the “Dog and Pheasant” that the Captain could put up with even if he had not been always very short of money—­absurdly short even of coppers—­and Julia saw that he was short.  There remained nothing for him but the hospitality of acquaintances, and they did not abound in Halgrave, the only place within reach; also, as he declared, they were a stingy lot.  The next time he called upon his new friend, the veterinary surgeon, he was at a loss to understand this; it was unlike his previous experience of the man and most disagreeably surprising; he could not think why it should happen.  But then he had not seen Julia set out for Halgrave on the afternoon of the same day that she explained things to him.  She had on all her best clothes, even her best boots, in spite of the bad roads.  She looked trim and dainty as a Frenchwoman, but there was something about her which suggested business.