She spoke: 

“It is a very serious thing, giving a man your promise and then——­”

“Then finding that your duty to him—­to him, mind—­forces you to tell him that you cannot carry out that promise,” said her father.  “Yes, it is a very serious thing, but not so serious as carrying out that promise would be if you had even the least little feeling that at the end of three months he was not a better man than you suspected he was at the beginning.  There’s a bright side to everything, even a honeymoon; but the reason that a honeymoon is so frequently a failure is because the man is bound to be found out by his wife inside the month.  It is better that you found out now, than later on, that you could not possibly be happy with a man who spoke slightingly of the patriarchs and their wives.  Now I’ll leave you, with confidence that you will be able to explain matters to Mr. Holland.”

“What! you won’t be here?”

Dismay was in the girl’s face as she spoke.  She had clearly looked for the moral support of her father’s presence while she would be making her explanation to the man whom she had, a few months before, promised to marry, but whom she had found it necessary to dismiss by letter, owing to her want of sympathy in some of his recent utterances.

“You won’t be here?”

“No; I have unfortunately an engagement just at that hour, Phyllis,” replied Mr. Ayrton.  “But do you really think there is any need for me to be here?  Personally, I fancy that my presence would only tend to complicate matters.  Your own feeling, your own woman’s instinct, will enable you to explain—­well, all that needs explanation.  I have more confidence in your capacity to explain since you gave that pretty little laugh just now.  Experience—­ah, the experience of a girl such as you are, suggests an astronomer without a telescope.  Still, there were astronomers before there were telescopes; and so I leave you, my beloved child—­ah, my own child once again!  No cold hand of a lover is now between us.”

It was not until he was some distance down Piccadilly that it occurred to him that he should have pictured the lover with a warm hand; and that omission on his part caused him a greater amount of irritation than anyone who was unaware of his skill in phrase-making could have thought possible to arise from a lapse apparently so trifling.

It was not until he had reached the Acropolis and had referred, in the hearing of the most eminently dull of the many distinguished members of that club, to the possibility of a girl’s experiences of man being likened to an astronomer without a telescope, that he felt himself again.

The dull distinguished man had smiled.

CHAPTER II.

He knew that it was A troublesome process, becoming A good clergyman, so he determined to become A good preacher instead.