Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/303

Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman said Sir Appleton. “You have not had time to forget our last meeting. I was made aware then of several things: as that your son had taken advantage of a young girl’s innocence and was leaving her to bear the consequences. . . As that you were opposed heart and soul to such a mésalliance as would result from his marrying her. . . As that you were unhappily not in a position to make adequate financial provision for her, but that you would pay her a hundred pounds ‘in full discharge’, as we say in business. . . I felt that, as there was no law to cope with such gentry as your son, some one must take the law into his own hands. Now, Miss Phenton had no relations of an age to protect her, and your nephew seemed reluctant to vindicate the family honour—I sympathize with him; his words were: ‘If once one starts thrashing the little beast, I don’t see where it’s going to end,’—; I therefore decided that it was incumbent on me, as the one person whom Miss Phenton had consulted, to administer such a lesson that your son would remember it to the end of his days. Having the good fortune to meet him in the street this afternoon, I invited him to come home with me and—be whipped!” My attention had wandered a little in preparing a speech for my Lord Culroyd the next 291