By an effort he kept his eyes steadily fixed on his father's face, and what he saw there did not supply encouragement to proceed in the genial tone with which he had begun.

Mr.
Athel frowned, not angrily, but as if not quite able to grasp what had been told him.

He had cast his eyes down.
There was silence for a moment.
'I have chosen the earliest moment for telling you of this,' Wilfrid continued, rather hurriedly.

'It was of course better to leave it till Miss Hood had gone.' On the father's face displeasure had succeeded to mere astonishment.
'You could have told me few things that I should be so sorry to hear,' were his first words, delivered in an undertone and with grave precision.
'Surely that does not express your better thought,' said Wilfrid, to whom a hint of opposition at once gave the firmness he had lacked.
'It expresses my very natural thought.

In the first place, it is not pleasant to know that clandestine proceedings of this kind have been going on under my roof.