He began to see that it was possible to gain
one's own point and lose something infinitely more precious. It hurt
him to see her suffer, and he despised himself as the suspected cause
of her sufferings. He asked himself how he could have endured it if,
in his courting days, he had been shut out from the woman he loved.
She was infinitely his superior, he thought with a swelling heart, and
then his arm fell on the back of the chair beside him, and his hand
clenched, as he grimly wondered what bolts or bars would suffice to
have kept them apart. If she was alive now would she have taken this
cruelly peremptory course with their daughter? He revolved the
question with a sore heart. It admitted of but one answer. In all her
sweet and gentle life his wife had never been either peremptory or
cruel.
Unknown to Rose her father's stout heart showed signs of thawing with
the weather. He began to inform himself warily, and by indirect means,
with regard to the character, circumstances, and prospects of Allan
Dunlop, in much the same way as we make a study of the drug, hitherto
supposed to be a poison, but now believed capable of saving the life
of a loved one.
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