‘I doubt if the peer breathes on whom I would confer it.’

‘Were there insanity in the family, I should believe you mad. Your eccentricity and conceit touch the verge of frenzy.’

‘Perhaps, ere I have finished, you will see me overleap it.’

‘I anticipate no less. Frantic and impracticable girl! Take warning! I dare you to sully our name by a mésalliance!’

Our name! Am I called Sympson?’

‘God be thanked that you are not! But be on your guard; I will not be trifled with!’

‘What, in the name of common law and commonsense, sense, would you or could you do if my pleasure led me to a choice you disapproved?’

‘Take care—take care!’ (warning her with voice and hand that trembled alike).

‘Why? What shadow of power have you over me? Why should I fear you?’

‘Take care, madam!’

‘Scrupulous care I will take, Mr. Sympson. Before I marry, I am resolved to esteem—to admire—to love.’

‘Preposterous stuff! indecorous! unwomanly!’

‘To love with my whole heart. I know I speak in an unknown tongue, but I feel indifferent whether I am comprehended or not.’

‘And if this love of yours should fall on a beggar?’

‘On a beggar it will never fall. Mendicancy is not estimable.’

‘On a low clerk, a play-actor, a play-writer, or—or—’

‘Take courage, Mr. Sympson. Or what?’

‘Any literary scrub, or shabby, whining artist.’

‘For the scrubby, shabby, whining, I have no taste; for literature and the arts I have. And there I wonder how your Fawthrop Wynne would suit me? He cannot write a note without orthographical errors; he reads only a sporting paper; he was the booby of Stilbro’ Grammar-school.’

‘Unladylike language! Great God!—to what will she come?’ He lifted hands and eyes.

‘Never to the altar of Hymen with Sam Wynne.’

‘To what will she come? Why are not the laws more stringent, that I might compel her to hear reason?’

‘Console yourself, uncle. Were Britain a serfdom, and you the Czar, you could not compel me to this step. I will write to Mr. Wynne. Give yourself no further trouble on the subject.’

Fortune is proverbially called changeful, yet her caprice often takes the form of repeating again and again a similar stroke of luck in the same quarter. It appeared that Miss Keeldar—or her fortune—had by this time made a sensation in the district, and produced an impression in quarters by her unthought of. No less than three offers followed Mr. Wynne’s—all more or less eligible. All were in succession


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