"Father," she said, "I don't think that you ever met my husband, though I daresay you know him by sight as well as he knows you. Jack, this is my father."
He looked at her and then at him. His mouth was very tightly closed. He stood quite a yard away from them and ignored Jack's very cordial salutation.
"You must forgive these light-headed young people, Mr. Wadhurst," said Mrs. Wingfield the elder. "But it was really very naughty of them to take the law into their own hands and get married by a registrar instead of going properly to the church."
"Married!" said the churchwarden. "Married within three months of the death of her husband! You did well to do it in that hole-and-corner way; for you knew me too well to hope that I would give my consent."
"That's quite true," said she. "But I told you long ago that I had made up my mind that a woman's marriage is her own affair, not her father's. I had one experience of the union that receives the blessing of the father and the blessing of the Church."
He looked at her. His mouth was tightly shut once again.
"Look here, Mr. Wadhurst," cried Jack. "We're just going in to lunch. If you didn't give your consent to our marriage, you have still time to give us your blessing. Hurry up. The lobsters in the dining-room will be becoming anxious."
He still kept his eyes fixed upon his daughter. He did not seem to hear Jack speaking. But the moment that Jack had said his last word, Mr. Wadhurst glanced at him, and then, turning round, walked straight across the lawn.
They watched him in silence until he became occulted by the pavilion.
"The lobsters will be getting impatient," said Jack, helping his mother to her feet.
Another delightful week elapsed, with yacht cruises and adventures by flood and field, and then Priscilla, never giving herself up with such complete abandonment to the intoxication of the first month of marriage as to be incapable of observing the changes of time and temper and temperature--the variations in the pulse of that little spiritual animal known by the pet name of Love, began to perceive that Jack was thinking about home; and that meant that she had been wholly successful in her treatment of that happiness of his which demanded the wisest nursing, with a mental chart of its variations from day to day. Women who are wise adopt the modern system of therapeutics, and devote all their thought to the nursing of that happiness which has been entrusted to their care when it is still in its cradle, and do not trouble about the Pharmacopoeia. It had been her aim to lead him to think about his home--their home--as that was where she meant him to spend most of his time; and the wife who can keep her husband's attention most closely directed to home is the wisest as well as the happiest. The accountants who were going over the books of the estate, kept in a culpably slovenly way by Mr. Dunning, were, he was informed, approaching the end of their labours; and the new agent, who had been found with really only a reasonable amount of difficulty, was by the side of the accountants and the stewards and the bailiffs, mastering the details of the old system, which had been far from systematic, and, as Jack and Priscilla could see by his letters, instituting a new _regime_ on a proper basis.