mistake in this.'

'I am complying with Lady Mary's wishes in asking your permission
to enter your house as a suitor.' The Duke stood for a moment
biting his lips in silence. 'I cannot believe it,' he said at
last. 'I cannot bring myself to believe it. There must be some
mistake. My daughter! Lady Mary Palliser!' Again the young man
bowed his head. 'What are your pretensions?'

'Simply her regard.'

'Of course it is impossible. You are not so ignorant but that you
must have known as much when you came to me.'

There was so much scorn in his words, and in the tone in which
they were uttered, that Tregear in his turn was becoming angry. He
had prepared himself to bow humbly before the great man, before
the Duke, before the Croesus, before the late Prime Minister,
before the man who was to be regarded as certainly the most
exalted of the earth; but he had not prepared himself to be looked
at as the Duke looked at him. 'The truth, my Lord Duke, is this,'
he said, 'that your daughter loves me, and that we are engaged to
each other,--as far as that engagement can be made without your
sanction as her father.'

'It cannot have been made at all,' said the Duke.

'I can only hope,--we can both of us only hope that a little time
may soften-'