I had promised Etherell to breakfast with him. A note--a faint scream--
despatched by Mrs. Waddy to Mr. Temple's house informed me that 'the men'
were upon them. If so, they were the forerunners of a horde, and my
father was as good as extinguished. He staked everything on success;
consequently, he forfeited pity.

Good-bye to ambition, I thought, and ate heartily, considering robustly
the while how far lower than the general level I might avoid falling.
The report of the debates in morning papers--doubtless, more flowing and,
perhaps, more grammatical than such as I gave ear to overnight--had the
odd effect on me of relieving me from the fit of subserviency into which
the speakers had sunk me.

A conceit of towering superiority took its place, and as Etherell was
kind enough to draw me out and compliment me, I was attacked by a tragic
sense of contrast between my capacities and my probable fortunes. It was
open to me to marry Janet. But this meant the loosening of myself with
my own hand for ever from her who was my mentor and my glory, to gain
whom I was in the very tideway. I could not submit to it, though the
view was like that of a green field of the springs passed by a climber up
the crags. I went to Anna Penrhys to hear a woman's voice, and partly
told her of my troubles. She had heard Mr. Hipperdon express his
confident opinion that he should oust me from my seat. Her indignation
was at my service as a loan: it sprang up fiercely and spontaneously in
allusions to something relating to my father, of which the Marquis of
Edbury had been guilty. 'How you can bear it!' she exclaimed, for I was
not wordy. The exclamation, however, stung me to put pen to paper--the
woman was not so remote in me as not to be roused by the woman. I wrote
to Edbury, and to Heriot, bidding him call on the young nobleman. Late
at night I was at my father's door to perform the act of duty of seeing