of your expectations and
my poverty. And, believe me, I would rather rot in a prison than enrich
myself by forcing your inclinations. You have but to say the word, and
I will (as becomes me as a man and gentleman) screen you from all chance
of Sir Miles's displeasure, by taking it on myself to decline an honour
of which I feel, indeed, very undeserving."

"But I have offended you," said Lucretia, softly, while she turned aside
to conceal the glad light of her eyes,--"pardon me; and to prove that
you do so, give me your arm to my uncle's room."

Vernon, with rather more of Sir Miles's antiquated stiffness than his
own rakish ease, offered his arm, with a profound reverence, to his
cousin, and they took their way to the house. Not till they had passed
up the stairs, and were even in the gallery, did further words pass
between them. Then Vernon said,--

"But what is your wish, Miss Clavering? On what footing shall I remain
here?"

"Will you suffer me to dictate?" replied Lucretia, stopping short with
well-feigned confusion, as if suddenly aware that the right to dictate
gives the right to hope.

"Ah, consider me at least your slave!" whispered Vernon, as, his
eye resting on the contour of that matchless neck, partially and
advantageously turned from him, he began, with his constitutional
admiration of the sex, to feel interested in a pursuit that now seemed,
after piquing, to flatter his self-love.

"Then I will use the privilege when we meet again," answered Lucretia;
and drawing her arm gently from his, she passed on to her uncle, leaving
Vernon midway in the gallery.

Those faded portraits looked down on her with that melancholy gloom
which the effigies of our dead ancestors seem mysteriously to acquire.
To noble and aspiring spirits, no homily to truth and honour and fair
ambition is more eloquent than the mute and melancholy canvas from which
our fathers, made, by death, our household gods, contemplate us still.
They appear to confide to us the charge of their unblemished names. They
speak to us from the grave, and heard aright, the pride of family is the
guardian angel of its heirs. But Lucretia, with her hard and scholastic
mind, despised as the veriest weakness all the poetry that belongs
to the sense of a pure descent. It was because she was proud as the
proudest in herself that she had nothing but contempt for the virtue,
the valour, or the wisdom of those that had gone before. So, with a
brain busy wit