Pagina 193 di 657

"Ah, thereby hangs a rather painful tale. This fellow is madly,

insanely, in love with her, but some two years ago, when he was

only a lad, and before he really knew her, for she had been away

five years at a boarding-school, what does the idiot do but get

into the clutches of a barmaid in Bristol and marry her at a

registry office? No one knows a word of the matter, but you can

imagine how maddening it must be to him to be upbraided for not

doing what he would give his very eyes to do, but what he knows

to be absolutely impossible. It was sheer frenzy of this sort

which made him throw his hands up into the air when his father,

at their last interview, was goading him on to propose to Miss

Turner. On the other hand, he had no means of supporting himself,

and his father, who was by all accounts a very hard man, would

have thrown him over utterly had he known the truth.