“Have you done so, Austin?”

“This is assuredly a new way of committing fathers to the follies of their sons, Emmeline!”

“No, not that.  But will you pray for your boy, and bless him, before the day comes?”

He restrained himself to pronounce his words calmly:—­“And I must do this, or it will end in misery?  How else can it end?  Can I save him from the seed he has sown?  Consider, Emmeline, what you say.  He has repeated his cousin’s sin.  You see the end of that.”

“Oh, so different!  This young person is not, is not of the class poor Austin Wentworth allied himself to.  Indeed it is different.  And he—­be just and admit his nobleness.  I fancied you did.  This young person has great beauty, she has the elements of good breeding, she—­indeed I think, had she been in another position, you would not have looked upon her unfavourably.”

“She may be too good for my son!” The baronet spoke with sublime bitterness.

“No woman is too good for Richard, and you know it.”

“Pass her.”

“Yes, I will speak only of him.  He met her by a fatal accident.  We thought his love dead, and so did he till he saw her again.  He met her, he thought we were plotting against him, he thought he should lose her for ever, and is the madness of an hour he did this....”

“My Emmeline pleads bravely for clandestine matches.”

“Ah! do not trifle, my friend.  Say:  would you have had him act as young men in his position generally do to young women beneath them?”

Sir Austin did not like the question.  It probed him very severely.

“You mean,” he said, “that fathers must fold their arms, and either submit to infamous marriages, or have these creatures ruined.”

“I do not mean that,” exclaimed the lady, striving for what she did mean, and how to express it.  “I mean that he loved her.  Is it not a madness at his age?  But what I chiefly mean is—­save him from the consequences.  No, you shall not withdraw your hand.  Think of his pride, his sensitiveness, his great wild nature—­wild when he is set wrong:  think how intense it is, set upon love; think, my friend, do not forget his love for you.”

Sir Austin smiled an admirable smile of pity.

“That I should save him, or any one, from consequences, is asking more than the order of things will allow to you, Emmeline, and is not in the disposition of this world.  I cannot.  Consequences are the natural offspring of acts.  My child, you are talking sentiment, which is the distraction of our modern age in everything—­a phantasmal vapour distorting the image of the life we live.  You ask me to give him a golden age in spite of himself.  All that could be done, by keeping him in the paths of virtue and truth, I did.  He is become a man, and as a man he must reap his own sowing.”

The baffled lady sighed.  He sat so rigid:  he spoke so securely, as if wisdom were to him more than the love of his son.  And yet he did love his son.  Feeling sure that he loved his son while he spoke so loftily, she reverenced him still, baffled as she was, and sensible that she had been quibbled with.