father, a father, I mean. God grant they may never want!--eh? the
dinner; boh! let's in to dinner. Ma'am!"

He bowed an arm to Mrs. Chump, who took it, with a scared look at him:
"Why, if ye haven't got a tear in your eye, Pole?"

"Nonsense, nonsense," quoth he, bowing another arm to Adela.

"Papa, I'm not to be winked at," said she, accepting convoy; and there
was some laughter, all about nothing, as they went in to dinner.

The ladies were studiously forbearing in their treatment of Mrs. Chump.
Women are wonderfully quick scholars under ridicule, though it half-kills
them. Wilfrid's theory had impressed the superior grace of civility upon
their minds, and, now that they practised it, they were pleased with the
contrast they presented. Not the less were they maturing a serious
resolve. The suspicion that their father had secret vile designs in
relation to Mrs. Chump, they kept in the background. It was enough for
them that she was to be a visitor, and would thus destroy the great
circle they had projected. To accept her in the circle, they felt, was
out of the question. Wilfrid's plain-speaking broke up the air-bubble,
which they had so carefully blown, and in which they had embarked all
their young hopes. They had as much as given one another a pledge that
their home likewise should be broken up.

"Are you not almost too severe a student?" Mr. Barrett happened to say to
Cornelia, the day after Wilfrid had worried her.

"Do I show the signs?" she replied.