Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/276

 loved her dearly, but the fact that she was a girl and not a boy somehow rankled; it was the only thing for which he had ever blamed his dead wife. Even then he would not have minded it so much, had not Jane, at an early age, exhibited certain man-like characteristics, chiefly a decisive and stubborn independence, which he would have admired in a son, but which irritated him in a daughter; the more so as Jane, with either conscious or unconscious cleverness, used her strictly feminine characteristics to back up and reënforce her masculine qualities—tempering steel with diamond, as it were—a combination which Mr. Warburton found it hard to combat.

The result was that she usually had her own way; and a further result was chromatic friction. As a rule, at least in minor matters, this friction was allayed by Mr. Warburton giving in, but in more important matters he acted differently at times, and showed a stubbornness which fully equaled hers.

He did so now, as he repeated that, even supposing that Hector had been innocently accused of cheating at cards, even granting that he had made a splendid success as de facto regent of Tamerlanistan, the fact of the old scandal which had driven him from England still existed, and could not be overlooked.

“What difference does that make?” demanded Jane. “He lives here—and not in England. He's through with Mayfair and Belgravia and the Horse Guards Barracks!”

“The greater his success here, the more his enemies …”

“He has no enemies—no personal enemies!”