surface in others. His daughter, as part of himself, came within the normal
range of his solicitude; but she was an outlying region, a subject
province; and Mr. Orme's was a highly centralized polity.

News of the painful incident--he often used Mrs. Peyton's vocabulary--had
reached him at his club, and to some extent disturbed the assimilation of a
carefully ordered breakfast; but since then two days had passed, and it did
not take Mr. Orme forty-eight hours to resign himself to the misfortunes of
others. It was all very nasty, of course, and he wished to heaven it hadn't
happened to any one about to be connected with him; but he viewed it with
the transient annoyance of a gentleman who has been splashed by the mud of
a fatal runaway.

Mr. Orme affected, under such circumstances, a bluff and hearty stoicism
as remote as possible from Mrs. Peyton's deprecating evasion of facts. It
was a bad business; he was sorry Kate should have been mixed up with it;
but she would be married soon now, and then she would see that life wasn't
exactly a Sunday-school story. Everybody was exposed to such disagreeable
accidents: he remembered a case in their own family--oh, a distant cousin
whom Kate wouldn't have heard of--a poor fellow who had got entangled with
just such a woman, and having (most properly) been sent packing by his
father, had justified the latter's course by promptly forging his name--a
very nasty affair altogether; but luckily the scandal had been hushed up,
the woman bought off, and the prodigal, after a season of probation, safely
married to a nice girl with a good income, who was told by the family that
the doctors recommended his settling in California.

_Luckily the scandal was hushed up_: the phrase blazed out against
the dark background of Kate's misery. That was doubtless what most people
felt--the words represented the consensus of respectable opinion. The best