The fact of it did come, and, as she feared, would
inevitably continue to come between her and her father, marring to an
appreciable degree their mutual confidence and sympathy. At Deadham he
had braced himself to deal with the subject in a spirit of rather
magnificent self-abnegation. But the effort had cost him more than she
quite cared to estimate, in lowered pride and moral suffering. It had
told on not only his mental but his physical health. Now that he was in
great measure restored, his humour no longer saturnine, he no longer
remote, sunk in himself and inaccessible, it would be not only
injudicious, but selfish, to the verge of active cruelty, to press the
subject again upon his notice, to propose further concessions, or further
recognition of its existence. She couldn't ask that of him--ten thousand
times no, she couldn't ask it--though not to ask it was to let the breach
in sympathy and confidence widen silently and grow.
So much was sadly clear to her. She unfolded Faircloth's letter and read
it through a second time, in vain hope of discovering some middle way,
some leading.
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