Aprils Lady | Page 4

parts his lips. "Now for it. Have no qualms. I've been preparing myself all through breakfast and I think I shall survive it. You are going to have it out with me, aren't you?"
"Not with you," says she, returning his smile indeed, but faintly, and without heart, "that horrid letter! I felt I must talk of it to someone, and----"
"I was that mythical person. I quite understand. I take it as a special compliment."
"I know it is hard on you, but when I am really vexed about anything, you know, I always want to tell you about it."
"I should feel it a great deal harder if you didn't want to tell me about it," says he. He has come nearer to her and has pressed her into a chair--a dilapidated affair that if ever it had a best day has forgotten it by now--and yet for all that is full of comfort. "I am only sorry"--moving away again and leaning against the chimney piece--"that you should be so foolish as to let my father's absurd prejudices annoy you at this time of day."
"He will always have it in his power to annoy me," says she quickly. "That perhaps," with a little burst of feeling, "is why I can't forgive him. If I could forget, or grow indifferent to it all, I should not have this hurt feeling in my heart. But he is your father, and though he is the most unjust, the cruellest man on earth, I still hate to think he should regard me as he does."
"There is one thing, however, you do forget," says Mr. Monkton gravely. "I don't want to apologize for him, but I would remind you that he has never seen you."
"That's only an aggravation of his offence," her color heightening; "the very fact that he should condemn me unseen, unheard, adds to the wrong he has done me instead of taking from it." She rises abruptly and begins to pace up and down the room, the hot Irish blood in her veins afire. "No"--with a little impatient gesture of her small hand--"I can't sit still. Every pulse seems throbbing. He has opened up all the old wounds, and----" She pauses and then turns upon her husband two lovely flashing eyes. "Why, why should he suppose that I am vulgar, lowly born, unfit to be your wife?"
"My darling girl, what can it matter what he thinks? A ridiculous headstrong old man in one scale, and----"
"But it does matter. I want to convince him that I am not--not--what he believes me to be."
"Then come over to England and see him."
"No--never! I shall never go to England. I shall stay in Ireland always. My own land; the land whose people he detests because he knows nothing about them. It was one of his chief objections to your marriage with me, that I was an Irish girl!"
She stops short, as though her wrath and indignation and contempt is too much for her.
"Barbara," says Monkton, very gently, but with a certain reproach, "do you know you almost make me think that you regret our marriage."
"No, I don't," quickly. "If I talked for ever I shouldn't be able to make you think that. But----" She turns to him suddenly, and gazes at him through large eyes that are heavy with tears. "I shall always be sorry for one thing, and that is--that you first met me where you did."
"At your aunt's? Mrs. Burke's?"
"She is not my aunt," with a little frown of distaste; "she is nothing to me so far as blood is concerned. Oh! Freddy." She stops close to him, and gives him a grief-stricken glance. "I wish my poor father had been alive when first you saw me. That we could have met for the first time in the old home. It was shabby--faded"--her face paling now with intense emotion. "But you would have known at once that it had been a fine old place, and that the owner of it----" She breaks down, very slightly, almost imperceptibly, but Monkton understands that even one more word is beyond her.
"That the owner of it, like St. Patrick, came of decent people," quotes he with an assumption of gaiety he is far from feeling. "My good child, I don't want to see anyone to know that of you. You carry the sign manual. It is written in large characters all over you."
"Yet I wish you had known me before my father died," says she, her grief and pride still unassuaged. "He was so unlike anybody else. His manners were so lovely. He was offered a baronetcy at the end of that Whiteboy business on account of his loyalty--that nearly cost him his life--but he refused it, thinking the old name good enough without a handle to it."
"Kavanagh, we all