the misfortune to offend
you?'

'You won't offend me,' said I.

She hoped not.

I rallied her: 'Tut, tut, you talk like any twelve-years-old, Janet.'

'I offended you then!'

'Every day! it's all that I care much to remember.'

She looked pleased, but I was so situated that I required passion and
abandonment in return for a confession damaging to my pride. Besides,
the school I had been graduating in of late unfitted me for a young
English gentlewoman's shades and intervolved descents of emotion. A
glance up and a dimple in the cheek, were pretty homely things enough,
not the blaze I wanted to unlock me, and absolutely thought I had
deserved.

Sir Roderick called her to the library on business, which he was in
the habit of doing ten times a day, as well as of discussing matters of
business at table, ostentatiously consulting his daughter, with a solemn
countenance and a transparently reeling heart of parental exultation.
'Janet is supreme,' he would say: 'my advice is simple advice; I am
her chief agent, that is all.' Her chief agent, as director of three
Companies and chairman of one, was perhaps competent to advise her,
he remarked. Her judgement upon ordinary matters he agreed with my
grandfather in thinking consummate.

Janet went to him, and shortly after drove him to the station for
London. My aunt Dorothy had warned me that she was preparing some deed
in my favour, and as I fancied her father to have gone to London for
that purpose, and supposed she would now venture to touch on it, I
walked away from the East gates of the park as soon as I heard the trot
of her ponies, and was led by an evil fate (the stuff the fates are
composed of in my instance I have not kept secret) to walk Westward.
Thither my evil fate propelled me, where accident was ready to espouse
it and breed me mortifications innumerable. My father chanced to have
heard the particulars of Squire Beltham's will that morning: I believe
Captain William's coachman brushed the subject despondently in my
interests; it did not reach him through Julia.

He stood outside the Western gates, and as I approached, I could
perceive a labour of excitement on his frame. He pulled violently at the
bars of the obstruction.

'Richie, I am interdicted house and grounds!' he called, and waved his
hand toward the lodge: 'they decline to open to me.'

'Were you denied admission?' I asked him.

'--Your name, if you please, sir?--Mr. Richmond Roy.--We are s