Callous and unhesitating as he was, nevertheless Mr. Guyon felt considerable apprehension about the impending explanation with Katharine. No material disagreement had ever taken place between his daughter and himself. He had always had a sense of Katharine's intellectual superiority which had governed him in certain respects; and an unexpressed unwillingness to rouse a temper which he felt a tacit conviction he could not rule had restrained him from opposing her unnecessarily; so that his daughter had always given him credit for much more amiability and complaisance than he actually possessed. He was not afraid of her in any actively restraining sense, or he would not have entertained such a design as that he was now prosecuting against her; but he was afraid of a war of words with her; he was afraid that her keenness might lead her to suspicion; above all, he dreaded her girlish ignorance, her disregard of wealth, when wealth only was what he had to urge upon her acceptance. The announcement of Gordon Frere's departure was the cause of almost as profound an emotion to Mr. Guyon as to his daughter. To her it meant the extinction of hope, the blighting of joy, the outraging of love and pride, the awakening of passionate anger and agonising grief. To him it meant the termination of a period of most unpleasant suspense, during which he did not dare to take a step towards the furtherance of his plans, lest at any moment they might collapse, and defeat insure detection. But all had turned out rightly for him; he was safe; the young man--"the biggest fool of the lot" Mr. Guyon called him, with coarse contempt for the pliability of his victim--had received his sentence in silence and without protest, and had left England; a circumstance beyond Mr. Guyon's hopes, which had extended only to his keeping out of Katharine's way until the scheme should have succeeded.