“Never come back!” Clare’s wonder was so great that she repeated the last words without any real sense of their meaning, as she would have repeated anything that made a pause in this strange narrative. Her father! She seemed to herself to possess his later life--to know its every detail--to hold it, as it were, in her hands. He had never done anything without telling her--without consulting her, she would have said. Yet here was a secret of which she knew nothing. She was not selfish, but her mind was not so readily open to the affairs of others as was that of her brother. She never thought of the young sailor, or of the old mother, who spoke so sadly. She thought only of her father and his secret. What were the others to her? Of course she would have been sorry for them had their sorrows been sufficiently impressed on her imagination. But in the meantime it was her father she was thinking of, with bewildering wonder and pain.
Mrs. Murray, on the other hand, was absorbed with her own part of the tale. “He never came back,” she repeated, with a thrill of agitation in her voice. “He was lost in the wild sea, far out of our reach. Oh! it might have happened a’ the same. It might have come to the innocentest woman as it came to me. Many a lad is lost, and many a family brought to mourning, and naebody to blame. But when I think of all that’s been in my life, and that the like of that should come by means o’ the one man!---- That is how Jeanie knew your father, Miss Arden. She took your cousin for him, and it made her wild. I daurna bring her here to pain her with his picture. She was aye a strange bairn all her life, and Willie’s loss made her all wrong. That’s what I came to tell you, to be honest and clear o’ reproach. I’m no good or without guilt, that I should say so--but, oh, I hate a lie!”
Clare scarcely heeded this exclamation. She did not realise it, nor occupy herself about what her visitor felt. There was so much in this revelation that concerned herself that she had no leisure for other people’s feelings. “I do not see how you could blame papa,” she said, almost coldly; “of course, he did it for the best. How was he to know the ship would be lost? I am sorry, but I think it very strange that you should suppose it was his fault. Jeanie ought to be told how foolish it is. Papa would not have hurt any one--he would not have been cruel to--a fly.”