Was this, he asked himself in all
honesty, a mate for Rosamund? Could he entrust her happiness to the
care of such a man? Assuredly he could not.
Therefore, being whole again, he went to remonstrate with her as he
accounted it his duty and as Master Peter had besought him. Yet knowing
the bias that had been his he was careful to understate rather than to
overstate his reasons.
"But, Sir John," she protested, "if every man is to be condemned for the
sins of his forbears, but few could escape condemnation, and wherever
shall you find me a husband deserving your approval?"
"His father...." began Sir John.
"Tell me not of his father, but of himself" she interrupted.
He frowned impatiently--they were sitting in that bower of hers above
the river.
"I was coming to 't," he answered, a thought testily, for these
interruptions which made him keep to the point robbed him of his best
arguments. "However, suffice it that many of his father's vicious
qualities he has inherited, as we see in his ways of life; that he has
not inherited others only the future can assure us."
"In other words," she mocked him, yet very seriously, "I am to wait
until he dies of old age to make quite sure that he has no such sins as
must render him an unfitting husband?"
"No, no," he cried. "Good lack! what a perverseness is thine!"
"The perverseness is your own, Sir John. I am but the mirror of it.
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