ed at the half indication of
her relenting, which spoiled her look of modestly--resolute beauty, and
seemed to show that she meant to succumb without letting me break her.
'You are mistress of the place.'

'I am. I wish I were not.'

'You are mistress of Riversley, and you refuse to let my father come
in!'

'While I am the mistress, yes.'

'Anywhere but here, Harry! If he will see me or aunty, if he will kindly
appoint any other place, we will meet him, we shall be glad.'

'I request you to let him enter the house. Do you consent or not?'

'He was refused once at these doors. Do you refuse him a second time?'

'I do.'

'You mean that?'

'I am obliged to.'

'You won't yield a step to me?'

'I cannot.'

The spirit of an armed champion was behind those mild features, soft
almost to supplication to me, that I might know her to be under a
constraint. The nether lip dropped in breathing, the eyes wavered: such
was her appearance in open war with me, but her will was firm.

Of course I was not so dense as to be unable to perceive her grounds for
refusing.

She would not throw the burden on her grandada, even to propitiate
me--the man she still loved.

But that she should have a reason, and think it good, in spite of me,
and cling to it, defying me, and that she should do hurt to a sentient
human creature, who was my father, for the sake of blindly obeying to
the letter the injunction of the dead, were intolerable offences to me
and common humanity. I, for my own part, would have forgiven her, as I
congratulated myself upon reflecting. It was on her account--to open
her mind, to enlighten her concerning right and wrong determination, to
bring her feelings to bear upon a crude judgement--that I condescended
to argue the case. Smarting with admiration, both of the depths and
shallows of her character, and of her fine figure, I began:--She was
to consider how young she was to pretend to decide on the balance of
duties, how little of the world she had seen; an oath sworn at the
bedside of the dead was a solemn thing, but was it Christian to keep
it to do an unnecessary cruelty to the living? if she had not studied
philosophy, she might at least discern the difference between just
resolves and insane--between those the soul sanctioned, and those
hateful to nature; to bind oneself to carry on another person's
vindictiveness was voluntarily to adopt slavery; this was flatly-avowed
insanity, and so forth, with an e