Every allusion to her was full of love.

But yet how heavy a charge was really made! That such a secret should be kept from him, the father, was acknowledged to be a heinous fault;--but the wife had known the secret and had kept it from him, the father! And then how wretched a thing it was for him that any one should dare to write to him about the wife that had been taken away from him! In spite of all her faults her name was so holy to him that it had never once passed his lips since her death, except in low whispers to himself,--low whispers made in the perfect, double-guarded seclusion of his own chamber.

"Cora, Cora," he had murmured, so that the sense of the sound and not the sound itself had come to him from his own lips.

And now this woman wrote to him about her freely, as though there were nothing sacred, no religion in the memory of her.
"It was not for me to raise any question as to Mr.Tregear's fitness." Was it not palpable to all the world that he was unfit?
Unfit! How could a man be more unfit?
He was asking for the hand of one who was second only to royalty--who was possessed of everything, who was beautiful, well-born, rich, who was the daughter of the Duke of Omnium, and he had absolutely nothing of his own to offer.
But it was necessary that he should at last come to the consideration of the actual point as to which she had written to him so forcibly.
He tried to set himself to the task in perfect honesty.

He certainly had condemned her.