Moreover, had Miss Verinder been in any danger of forgetting the man himself and his more intimate characteristics, she received at least one sharp reminder.
On a certain winter afternoon his father came to call upon her, by appointment.
“I was so glad to get your note giving me permission,” said the elder Mr. Dyke. “It is very kind of you.”
“Oh, not at all,” said Emmie; using, as so often happens when we feel that an occasion is momentous, the tritest and most simple form of words. “Do please sit down”; and she indicated that she wished him to choose the sofa as his seat. Her nerves were fluttered and her thoughts in some disorder during these first civilities.
“It is a great pleasure, Miss Verinder, to make your acquaintance.”
“And I,” said Emmie earnestly, “have wanted to know you, Mr. Dyke. I have wanted it so much--so very much.”
“Thank you. It is good indeed of you to say that. I should have wished to come long ago--but, well, somehow I did not venture”; and he had a smile that seemed to shoot like an arrow into Emmie’s gentle breast and set it throbbing with exquisite pain. Almost, for that instant, Anthony might have been there smiling at her. “No, I wished to do so--but one is always afraid of seeming intrusive. Only when he wrote to me--”
Mr. Dyke sat then upon the sofa, and they began to talk about his son.
He was a much smaller man than Anthony, very thin and spare, and yet obviously possessing something of Anthony’s iron strength; so that, although sixty-four or sixty-five years of age, he gave one an impression of a person who will go on living for a great while without ever growing really old. He too had blue eyes and a straight nose, but one could not imagine this face becoming hawklike or fierce. He was quite dignified, yet devoid of all commanding or majestic attributes. His manner, reminding her of Anthony’s now and then in its deferential courtliness, more particularly as expressed by bowing the head, was quite that of a man of the world. And Emmie noticed that his sacred calling was not indicated by the slightest sign in the clothes he wore. Then as her nerves steadied themselves, while he went on talking and she listening, she thought of nothing beyond the one fact that he was Anthony’s father.