understand me when she has recovered the shock. On one head I shall
give warning. She must choose between us and her father. If she
persist in going out to join this establishment, I will have your
engagement given up.'

'Father! father! you would not be so cruel!'

'I know what I am saying. Am I to allow you to be encumbered all the
time she is on the other side of the world, waiting Ponsonby's
pleasure, to come home at last, in ten or fifteen years' time,
worried and fretted to death, like her poor mother? No, Louis, it
must be now or never.'

'You are only saying what I would not hear from her. She has been
insisting on breaking off, and all my hope was in you.'

'She has? That is like her! The only reasonable thing I have heard
yet.'

'Then you will not help me? You, who I thought loved her like your
own daughter, and wished for nothing so much!'

'So I might; but that is a different thing from allowing you to wear
out your life in a hopeless engagement. If she cast off her family,
nothing could be better, otherwise, I would never connect you with
them.'

It did not occur to his lordship that he was straining pretty hard
the filial duty of his own son, while he was arguing that Mary should
snap asunder the same towards her father.