My Lord Duke by E.W. Hornung

The Home Secretary had never spent a more uncomfortable hour. His favourite daughter had stanched her tears, and gone straight to the root of the very delicate matter at issue between them. Much as her tears had depressed him, however, Mr. Sellwood preferred them to the subsequent attitude. It was too independent for his old-fashioned notions, and yet it made him think all the more of Olivia. Indeed she was her father's child in argument -- spirited and keen and fair. His point of view she took for granted, and proceeded to expound her own. Much that she said was unanswerable; a little made him fidget -- for between the sexes there is no such shyness as that which a father finds in his heart towards his grown-up girls. But a certain bluntness of speech was not the least refreshing trait in Olivia's downright character, and decidedly this was not a matter to be glossed over with synonyms for a spade.

She wanted to know how the circumstances of the birth affected the value of the man -- and so forth. Mr. Sellwood replied as a man of the world, and detested his replies. But the worst was his guilty knowledge of Jack's flight. This made him detest himself; it made him lie; and it filled him with a relief greater than his surprise when voices came out of the darkness of the drive, and one of them was Jack's.