"James Bowdoin, you're a d----d fool!" sputtered his irate sire. "You talk as your wife might talk. This is an affair of men. Jamie," he added very gently, "you are quite right. My boy's an ass." He put his hand on Jamie's shoulder. "You'll find some fine young fellow to marry her yet, and she'll bring you--grandchildren."
"I may--I need hardly ask you to forget this?" said Jamie timidly, and making hastily for the door.
"Of course; and she shall stay in her old home where she was bred from a child, and, d----n 'em, my grandchildren shall go to see her there"--But the door had closed.
"James Bowdoin, if my son, with his d----d snicker, were one half so good a gentleman as that old clerk, I'd trust him with--with an earl's daughter," said the old gentleman inconsequently, and violently rubbing a tingling nose.
"I think you're right, governor," said James Bowdoin. "Did you notice how spruced up and young the poor fellow was? I wish to goodness I hadn't laughed, though. He might have married the girl. Why not? How old is he?"
"Why not? Ask her. He may be forty, more or less."
"What a strange thing to have come into the old fellow's life! And we thought it would give him something to care for! I never fancied he loved her that way."
"I don't believe now he loves her so much _that_ way--as--as he loves her," said old Mr. Bowdoin, as if vaguely. "She isn't worth him."
"She's really quite beautiful. I never saw a Spanish girl before with hair of gold."
No plummet ever sank so deep as Jamie sank the thoughts of those few months. No oblivion more vast than where he buried it. No human will so strong as that he bent upon it, bound it down with. No sin absolved was ever so forgotten. One wonders if Jamie, at the day of judgment even, will remember it. Perhaps 'twill then be no more the sin he thought it. For Jamie's nature, like that of spiny plants, was sensitive, delicate within, as his outer side was bent and rough; and he fancied it, first, a selfishness; then, as his lonely fancy got to brooding on it, an actual sin. James Bowdoin's unlucky laugh had taught him how it seemed to others; and was not inordinate affection, to the manifest injury of the object loved, a sin? Jamie felt it so; and he had the Prayer Book's authority therefor. "Inordinate and sinful affections,"--that is the phrase; both are condemned.