Probably the result would, after all, have been nil, had not the following few remarks been made one day at breakfast.
Her father was in his old hearty spirits. He smiled to himself at stories too bad to tell, and called Elfride a little scamp for surreptitiously preserving some blind kittens that ought to have been drowned. After this expression, she said to him suddenly: 'If Mr. Smith had been already in the family, you would not have been made wretched by discovering he had poor relations?'
'Do you mean in the family by marriage?' he replied inattentively, and continuing to peel his egg.
The accumulating scarlet told that was her meaning, as much as the affirmative reply.
'I should have put up with it, no doubt,' Mr. Swancourt observed.
'So that you would not have been driven into hopeless melancholy, but have made the best of him?'
Elfride's erratic mind had from her youth upwards been constantly in the habit of perplexing her father by hypothetical questions, based on absurd conditions. The present seemed to be cast so precisely in the mould of previous ones that, not being given to syntheses of circumstances, he answered it with customary complacency.
'If he were allied to us irretrievably, of course I, or any sensible man, should accept conditions that could not be altered; certainly not be hopelessly melancholy about it. I don't believe anything in the world would make me hopelessly melancholy. And don't let anything make you so, either.'
'I won't, papa,' she cried, with a serene brightness that pleased him.
Certainly Mr. Swancourt must have been far from thinking that the brightness came from an exhilarating intention to hold back no longer from the mad action she had planned.
In the evening he drove away towards Stratleigh, quite alone. It was an unusual course for him. At the door Elfride had been again almost impelled by her feelings to pour out all.
'Why are you going to Stratleigh, papa?' she said, and looked at him longingly.
'I will tell you to-morrow when I come back,' he said cheerily; 'not before then, Elfride. Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know, and so far will I trust thee, gentle Elfride.'
She was repressed and hurt.
'I will tell you my errand to Plymouth, too, when I come back,' she murmured.
He went away. His jocularity made her intention seem the lighter, as his indifference made her more resolved to do as she liked.
It was a familiar September sunset, dark-blue fragments of cloud upon an orange-yellow sky. These sunsets used to tempt her to walk towards them, as any beautiful thing tempts a near approach. She went through the field to the privet hedge, clambered into the middle of it, and reclined upon the thick boughs. After looking westward for a considerable time, she blamed herself for not looking eastward to where Stephen was, and turned round. Ultimately her eyes fell upon the ground.