Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/232

222 "To try—certainly, if they are capable of anything so nasty. The only honourable conduct for them is to let you alone."

"Ah, they won't do that—they like me too much!" Gaston said, ingenuously.

"It's an odd way of liking. The best way to show that would be to let you marry the girl you love."

"Certainly—but they are profoundly convinced that she represents such dangers, such vulgarities, such possibilities of doing other things of the same sort, that it's upon them my happiness would be shattered."

"Well, if you yourself have no secret for persuading them of the contrary I'm afraid I can't teach you one."

"Yes, I ought to do it myself," said Gaston, in the candour of his meditations. Then he went on, in his torment of inconsistency—"They never believed in her from the first. My father was perfectly definite about it. At heart they never accepted her; they only pretended to do so because I guaranteed that she was incapable of doing a thing that could ever displease them. Then no sooner was my back turned than she perpetrated that!"

"That was your folly," Waterlow remarked, painting away.

"My folly—to turn my back?"

"No, no—to guarantee."