and severe for a woman, her wealth of black hair was brushed fiat back
from her forehead in uncompromising ugliness. Her figure was as
straight as a dart, but without lines or curves, her gown, of homely
stuff and ill-made, completed her unattractiveness. There was neither
blush nor tremor, nor any sign of softening in her cold eyes. Then
Douglas, in whom were already sown the seeds of a passionate discontent
with the narrowing lines of his unlovely life, who on the hillside and
in the sweet night solitudes had taken Shelley to his heart, had lived
with Keats and had felt his pulses beat thickly to the passionate love
music of Tennyson, stood silent and unresponsive. Child of charity he
might be, but the burden of his servitude was fast growing too heavy for
him. So he stood there whilst the old man's eyes flashed like steel,
and Joan's face, in her silent anger, seemed to grow into the likeness
of her father's.

"Dost hear, nephew Douglas? Take her hands in thine and thank thy God
who has sent thee, a pauper and a youth of ill-parentage, a daughter of
mine for wife."

Then the young man found words, though they sounded to him and to the
others faint and unimpressive.

"Uncle," he said, "there has been no word of this nor any thought of it
between Joan and myself. I am not old enough to marry nor have I the
inclination."

Terrible was the look flashed down upon him from those relentless
eyes-fierce, too, the words of his reply, measured and slow although
they were.