He would give them to her with both hands, if only she would settle down beside him, take a freehold of that chair and table in the library, for life! He looked back gloomily to his clumsy proposal about her mother, and to her remarks about Pamela.

It would be indeed intolerable if his children got in his way! The very notion put him in a fever.
If that tiresome fellow, Dell, had not interrupted them the night before, what would have happened?
He had all the consciousness of a man still in the prime of life, in spite of his white hair; for he had married at twenty-one, and had never--since they grew up--seemed to himself very much older than his elder children.

He had but a very dim memory of his wife.
Sometimes he felt as if, notwithstanding the heat of boyish passion which had led him to marry her, he had never really known her.

There were moments when he had an uncomfortable suspicion that for some years before her death she had silently but irrevocably passed judgment upon him, and had withdrawn her inner life from him.
Friends of hers had written to him after her death of beautiful traits and qualities in her of which he himself had known nothing.
In any case they were not traits and qualities which appealed in the long run to a man of his pursuits and temperament.

He was told that Pamela had inherited some of them.
A light rustling sound in the wood.