Here Clare paused with a good deal of natural indignant feeling. Was the woman trying to make some claim upon her, to establish a grievance? It was a kind thing her father had done. He had taken the trouble to interest himself about it without even telling his daughter. And then they were discontented because the ship was lost. How unreasonable, how preposterous it seemed! “Nothing must be said about my father which I ought not to hear,” she said after a pause. “No words can say how fond I was of papa. He was everything to me; he was so good to me. He never had any--secrets from me. No, I am sure he had not! He did not speak of you, because perhaps----For he was not one to blazon his own kindness, or---- And then he might forget. Why should he speak to me of you?”
“You think we are humble folk, no worthy to be thought upon,” said Mrs. Murray with a half smile. It was not sneering, but pitying, very grave and very sad. “And that’s true--that’s true. What was a life more or less in a poor farmhouse so long as the grand race ran on? You are very like your father, Miss Arden--that was the very way his thoughts ran----”
“His thoughts were always kind and good,” said Clare, hastily; and it was hard, very hard for her in the agitation of the moment to resist a girlish inclination to burst into tears. It was so ungrateful, she would have said--so cruel and unkind. What! because a kind service was done, which brought on painful results, was it the benefactor that was to be blamed? “If Jeanie were to be ill now, you might just as well say it was my doing,” she added in her suppressed passion, and felt that she disliked the very looks of this stranger and her monotonous Scotch voice.
Then there was a long pause. Clare turned over all the books on the table before her--took up and put down her work--twisted the wools about her fingers till her anger had somewhat evaporated. Mrs. Murray sat at a little distance from her, saying nothing. Her eyes were fixed on a portrait of Clare, taken a year or two before, which hung on the wall. She looked at it with a wondering interest, growing more and more earnest in her attention. “You are like _her_, too,” she said at length, with a certain astonishment. The portrait was not like Clare at that moment. It was Clare in repose, when gentler thoughts were in her mind. “You are like _her_, too,” Mrs. Murray resumed, with a little eagerness. “I could not have thought it. But you’re no one to let your heart be broken without a word, the Lord be praised.”