arguments. "However, suffice it that many of his father's vicious
qualities he has inherited, as we see in his ways of life; that he has
not inherited others only the future can assure us."

"In other words," she mocked him, yet very seriously, "I am to wait
until he dies of old age to make quite sure that he has no such sins as
must render him an unfitting husband?"

"No, no," he cried. "Good lack! what a perverseness is thine!"

"The perverseness is your own, Sir John. I am but the mirror of it."

He shifted in his chair and grunted. "Be it so, then," he snapped. "We
will deal with the qualities that already he displays." And Sir John
enumerated them.

"But this is no more than your judgment of him--no more than what you
think him."

"'Tis what all the world thinks him."

"But I shall not marry a man for what others think of him, but for what
I think of him myself. And in my view you cruelly malign him. I
discover no such qualities in Sir Oliver."

"'Tis that you should be spared such a discovery that I am beseeching
you not to wed him."

"Yet unless I wed him I shall never make such a discovery; and until I
make it I shall ever continue to love him and to desire to wed him. Is