'If you will only be kind, and wait two or three days?'

'Be sensible!'

'I am, as much as I can be.'

'Hard as a flint--you always were! The most grateful woman alive, I
admit. I know not another, I assure you, Janet, who, in return for
millions of money, would do such a piece of wanton cruelty. What! You
think he was not punished enough when he was berated and torn to shreds
in your presence? They would be cruel, perhaps--we will suppose it of
your sex--but not so fond of their consciences as to stamp a life out to
keep an oath. I forget the terms of the Will. Were you enjoined in it
to force him away?'

My father had stationed himself in the background. Mention of the Will
caught his ears, and he commenced shaking my aunt Dorothy's note,
blinking and muttering at a great rate, and pressing his temples.

'I do not read a word of this,' he said,--'upon my honour, not a word;
and I know it is her handwriting. That Will!--only, for the love of
heaven, madam,'--he bowed vaguely to Janet 'not a syllable of this to the
princess, or we are destroyed. I have a great bell in my head, or I
would say more. Hearing is out of the question.'

Janet gazed piteously from him to me.

To kill the deer and be sorry for the suffering wretch is common.

I begged my father to walk along the carriage-drive. He required that