the governess commanded, and obediently the little sallow girl dipped and swayed, and executed a neat little mockery of a curtsy. Only there is no mockery in her eyes, her father thought, with a curiously unreasonable pang of discomfort somewhere in the region of his chest as he gravely regarded those clear blue eyes, so uncannily like his, yet so completely alien to his. For they gazed at him bereft of expression, vacant and cold. Not an auspicious meeting, he thought wryly, wondering again whatever had possessed him, why in the world he had obeyed that vagrant impulse, as unnatural and beguiling as a breath of spring air in his December room; that maddening impulse to be quit of the Squire’s vast company. And to quit that admittedly deadening company for a return to his ancestral home, for a return, as it were, to the scene of his capital crime in begetting this unloved, and unlovingly begotten child. Age, he reasoned sardonically, encroaching age, it must have been. Only that would account for this absurd urge to finally see what I have left this earth heir to, to see what I have given my name and fortune to.
