The rector stood before her with his head down, as sorely humiliated a man as ever clergyman was. “If you take it in that light, what can I say? I had hoped you would not take it in that light. I am not an old man. I have not been accustomed to--apologise for myself,” he said, with a gleam of natural self-assertion. He, admired of ladies for miles round--to the four seas, so to speak--on every hand. He could have told her things! But the man was _digne_; he was no traitor nor ungrateful for kindness shown him. “If you think, Katherine, that the accident of my family and of a very early first marriage is so decisive, there is perhaps nothing more to be said. But many men only begin life at my age; and I think it is ungenerous--to throw my children in my teeth--when I was speaking to you--of things so different----” “Oh, Mr. Stanley,” cried Katherine, subdued, “I am very, very sorry. I did not mean to throw--anything in your teeth. But how could anyone forget Charlotte and Bertie and Evelyn and the rest? Do you call them an accident--all the family?” Katherine’s voice rose till it was almost shrill in the thought of this injury to her friends. “But I only think of you as their father and my clergyman--and always very, very kind,” she said. The flowers had never yet got put into the water. She had thrown them down again into the basket. The empty vase stood reproachfully full and useless, reflecting in its side a tiny sparkle of the firelight; and the girl sitting over them, and the man standing by her, had both of them downcast heads, and did not dare to look at each other. This group continued for a moment, and then he moved again towards the window. “It has begun at last,” he said in a strange changed tone. “It is snowing fast.” And the rector walked home in a blinding downfall, and was a white man, snow covered, when he arrived at home, where his children ran out to meet him, exclaiming at his beard which had grown white, and his hair, which, when his hat was taken off, exhibited a round of natural colour fringed off with ends of snow. The family surrounded him with chatterings and caresses, pulling off his coat, unwinding his scarf, shaking off the snow, leading him into the warm room by the warm fire, running off for warm shoes and everything he could want. An accident! The accident of a family! He submitted with a great effort over himself, but in his heart he would have liked to push them off, the whole band of them, into the snow. CHAPTER XXV.