The little man was still more reassured by the weight and prosperity of his office furniture. He sank into his chair, and motioned Paul to a seat. One glance to see that the door was shut behind him, and then: "I'm _very_ glad you've called. If there was a just law in this land, I ought to be able to prosecute you, I ought. You made my girl a Catholic, you did,--a Papist, _my_ girl! You go to college to learn to be a minister, and you come sneaking back pervertin' a girl like my Edith. And where is she now, I ask you, where is she now? In a convent, _that's_ where she is. Fair broke her mother's 'eart it has. A convent! Going to be a nun! And what tricks they'll play on her there, what dirty tricks them Jesuits will be up to----" Paul cut in decisively. "Mr. Thornton," he said, "that will do. That is utter rubbish, you know. What is more, it is beastly. I won't hear it." Mr. Thornton knew education and the manner of gentlemen. He had all the Claxted respect for them. So now this peremptory young man momentarily shut him up. "Er--er--I----" he stuttered. Paul leaned coolly back and waited. He was desperately angry, and he was beginning to be aware of a sense of bitter loss, but both, here, only made him cool. And his coolness enraged the photographer even as he stammered under his set-back. His sense of outrage, of personal injury, came rapidly to the fore again. It grew every second, and at last: "Well, I've lost my girl, anyway, I have, and through you. What had you got to do with her, anyway, that's what I want to know? Walkin' out with her--as good as--I hear now----" Paul flushed. There it was, the naked truth, as Alf Vintner and Maud and half the parish probably saw it. He bit his lip. "Mr. Thornton," he said, "I wanted to marry your daughter." Marry! The man gaped on him. Somehow he had not thought that. He had never thought that Mr. Kestern's son, at Cambridge too, doing so well, going to be a minister, had thought seriously of marrying his daughter. Heavens, what they had missed! And this young man apparently thought he had missed something, too. After all, then, he couldn't have persuaded her to seek a convent. This was a new development. "You don't say so, now, Mr. Kestern, sir," he said. "Well, Edith was a dear good girl, the best of the lot I always said. Whatever made her take up with that Catholikism, I can't tell. She never heard it in this house, I know. And seeing that you were going High Church, mother and I, we thought..." "What happened, Mr. Thornton, can you tell me that?"