Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/182

172 ? But oh," she added enthusiastically, "it is fine to me always—a young man come to manhood, the long apprenticeship to youth past, the world before him. Look at your boy with his mission to fulfil, the grand old name to carry on, to keep proud and stainless as it has ever been, to die with the knowledge that he has handed it on to his sons unsullied in his turn, and to rest at last with those great and brave men who gave it to him to pass on. Sometimes I almost wish my dear girl had been a boy—since I was to have but one, that it should have been a man-child."

"Hush! hush! You torture me."

"Why, dear? I do not understand you to-day." Lady Geraldine looked with surprise into her friend's white face.

"I suppose there is one thing you could not forgive"—Lady Osborne spoke slowly—"if your girl married with my knowledge a servant's child?"

Lady Geraldine, shocked and astonished, gazed at her friend for a minute in silence, then she said,—

"Why do you ask me such questions? My daughter is going to marry into a family as