It is possible that Osborne might have been induced to tell his
father of his marriage during their long solitary intercourse, if the
Squire, in an unlucky moment, had not given him his confidence about
Roger's engagement with Cynthia. It was on one wet Sunday afternoon,
when the father and son were sitting together in the large empty
drawing-room. Osborne had not been to church in the morning; the
Squire had, and he was now trying hard to read one of Blair's
sermons. They had dined early; they always did on Sundays; and either
that, or the sermon, or the hopeless wetness of the day, made the
afternoon seem interminably long to the Squire. He had certain
unwritten rules for the regulation of his conduct on Sundays. Cold
meat, sermon-reading, no smoking till after evening prayers, as
little thought as possible as to the state of the land and the
condition of the crops, and as much respectable sitting in-doors in
his best clothes as was consistent with going to church twice a day,
and saying the responses louder than the clerk. To-day it had rained
so unceasingly that he had remitted the afternoon church; but oh,
even with the luxury of a nap, how long it seemed before he saw the
Hall servants trudging homewards, along the field-path, a covey of
umbrellas! He had been standing at the window for the last half-hour,
his hands in his pockets, and his mouth often contracting itself into
the traditional sin of a whistle, but as often checked into sudden
gravity--ending, nine times out of ten, in a yawn. He looked askance
at Osborne, who was sitting near the fire absorbed in a book. The
poor Squire was something like the little boy in the child's story,
who asks all sorts of birds and beasts to come and play with him;
and, in every case, receives the sober answer, that they are too busy
to have leisure for trivial amusements. The father wanted the son to
put down his book, and talk to him: it was so wet, so dull, and a
little conversation would so wile away the time! But Osborne, with
his back to the window where his father was standing, saw nothing
of all this, and went on reading. He had assented to his father's
remark that it was a very wet afternoon, but had not carried on the
subject into all the varieties of truisms of which it was susceptible.
Something more rousing must be started, and this the Squire felt. The
recollection of the affair between Roger and Cynthia came into his
head, and, without giving it a moment's consideration, he began,--