. There was no renewal of open disagreement, but their
conversations frequently ended, by tacit mutual consent, at a point which
threatened divergence; and in Yule's case every such warning was a cause of
intense irritation. He feared to provoke Marian, and this fear was again a
torture to his pride.
    Beyond the fact that his daughter was in constant communication with the
Miss Milvains, he knew, and could discover, nothing of the terms on which she
stood with the girls' brother, and this ignorance was harder to bear than full
assurance of a disagreeable fact would have been. That a man like Jasper
Milvain, whose name was every now and then forced upon his notice as a rising
periodicalist and a faithful henchman of the unspeakable Fadge - that a young
fellow of such excellent prospects should seriously attach himself to a girl
like Marian seemed to him highly improbable, save, indeed, for the one
consideration, that Milvain, who assuredly had a very keen eye to chances, might
regard the girl as a niece of old John Yule, and therefore worth holding in view
until it was decided whether or not she would benefit by her uncle's decease.
Fixed in his antipathy to the young man, he would not allow himself to admit any
but a base motive on Milvain's side, if, indeed, Marian and Jasper were more to
each other than slight acquaintances; and he persuaded himself that anxiety for
the girl's welfare was at least as strong a motive with him as mere prejudice
against the ally of Fadge, and, it might be, the reviewer of English Prose.
Milvain was quite capable of playing fast and loose with a girl, and Marian,
owing to the peculiar circumstances of her position, would easily be misled by
the pretence of a clever speculator.
    That she had never spoken again about the review in The Current might
receive several explanations. Perhaps she had not been able to convince herself
either for or against Milvain's authorship; perhaps she had reason to suspect
that the young man was the author; perhaps she merely shrank from reviving a
discussion in which she might betray what she desired to keep secret. This last
was the truth. Finding that her father did not recur to the subject, Marian
concluded that he had found himself to be misinformed. But Yule, though he heard
the original rumour denied by people whom in other matters he would have
trusted, would not lay aside the doubt that flattered his prejudices. If Milvain
were not the writer of the review, he very well might have been; and what
certainty could be arrived at
