gratitude and reverence! Talk not to me of her amiable, tender, holy
aim, to obtrude upon my childless house the grand-daughter of a convicted
felon! Show her these lines, and ask her by what knowledge of my nature
she can assume that ignominy to my name would be a blessing to my hearth?
Ask her, indeed, how she can dare to force herself still upon my
thoughts--dare to imagine she can lay me under obligations--dare to think
she can be something still in my forlorn existence! Lionel Haughton, I
command you in the name of all the dead whom we can claim as ancestors in
common, to tear from your heart, as you would tear a thought of disgrace,
this image which has bewitched your reason. My daughter, thank Heaven,
left no pledge of an execrable union. But a girl who has been brought up
by a thief--a girl whom a wretch so lost to honour as Jasper Losely
sought to make an instrument of fraud to my harassment and disgrace, be
her virtues and beauty what they may, I could not, without intolerable
anguish, contemplate as the wife of Lionel Haughton. But receive her as
your wife!

"Admit her within these walls! Never, never; I scorn to threaten you with
loss of favour, loss of fortune. Marry her if you will. You shall have
an ample income secure to you. But from that moment our lives are
separated--our relation ceases. You will never again see nor address me.
But oh, Lionel, can you--can you inflict upon me this crowning sorrow?
Can you, for the sake of a girl of whom you have seen but little, or in
the Quixotism of atonement for your father's fault, complete the
ingratitude I have experienced from those who owed me most? I cannot
think it. I rejoice that you wrote--did not urge this suit in person.
I should not have been able to control my passion; we might have parted
foes. As it is, I restrain myself with difficulty! That woman, that
child, associated thus to tear from me the last affection left to my
ruined heart. No! You will not be so cruel! Send this, I command you,