“He was going to write about it for that paper in Paris.”  The girl had the effect of gathering her courage up for a bold plunge.  She looked steadily at her father, and added:  “He said he came back because he couldn’t help it.  He—­wished to speak with me, He said he knew he had no right to suppose I cared anything about what had happened with him and Mr. Stoller.  He wanted to come back and tell me—­that.”

Her father waited for her to go on, but apparently she was going to leave the word to him, now.  He hesitated to take it, but he asked at last with a mildness that seemed to surprise her, “Have you heard anything from him since?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.  I told him I could not say what he wished; that I must tell you about it.”

The case was less simple than it would once have been for General Triscoe.  There was still his affection for his daughter, his wish for her happiness, but this had always been subordinate to his sense of his own interest and comfort, and a question had recently arisen which put his paternal love and duty in a new light.  He was no more explicit with himself than other men are, and the most which could ever be said of him without injustice was that in his dependence upon her he would rather have kept his daughter to himself if she could not have been very prosperously married.  On the other hand, if he disliked the man for whom she now hardly hid her liking, he was not just then ready to go to extremes concerning him.

“He was very anxious,” she went on, “that you should know just how it was.  He thinks everything of your judgment and—­and—­opinion.”  The general made a consenting noise in his throat.  “He said that he did not wish me to ‘whitewash’ him to you.  He didn’t think he had done right; he didn’t excuse himself, or ask you to excuse him unless you could from the stand-point of a gentleman.”

The general made a less consenting noise in his throat, and asked, “How do you look at it, yourself, Agatha?”

“I don’t believe I quite understand it; but Mrs. March—­”

“Oh, Mrs. March!” the general snorted.

“—­says that Mr. March does not think so badly of it as Mr. Burnamy does.”

“I doubt it.  At any rate, I understood March quite differently.”

“She says that he thinks he behaved very nobly afterwards when Mr. Stoller wanted him to help him put a false complexion on it; that it was all the more difficult for him to do right then, because of his remorse for what he had done before.”  As she spoke on she had become more eager.

“There’s something in that,” the general admitted, with a candor that he made the most of both to himself and to her.  “But I should like to know what Stoller had to say of it all.  Is there anything,” he inquired, “any reason why I need be more explicit about it, just now?”

“N—­no.  Only, I thought—­He thinks so much of your opinion that—­if—­”