hall
give warning. She must choose between us and her father. If she
persist in going out to join this establishment, I will have your
engagement given up.'

'Father! father! you would not be so cruel!'

'I know what I am saying. Am I to allow you to be encumbered all the
time she is on the other side of the world, waiting Ponsonby's
pleasure, to come home at last, in ten or fifteen years' time, worried
and fretted to death, like her poor mother? No, Louis, it must be now
or never.'

'You are only saying what I would not hear from her. She has been
insisting on breaking off, and all my hope was in you.'

'She has? That is like her! The only reasonable thing I have heard
yet.'

'Then you will not help me? You, who I thought loved her like your own
daughter, and wished for nothing so much!'

'So I might; but that is a different thing from allowing you to wear
out your life in a hopeless engagement. If she cast off her family,
nothing could be better, otherwise, I would never connect you with
them.'

It did not occur to his lordship that he was straining pretty hard the
filial duty of his own son, while he was arguing that Mary should snap
asunder the same towards her father.

The fresh discomfiture made poor Louis feel utterly dejected and almost
hopeless, but lest silence should seem to consent, he said, 'When you
see Mary, you will be willing for me to do anything rather than lose
what is so dear and so noble.'

'Yes, I will see Mary. We will settle it between us, and have it right
yet; but we must give her to-day to think it over, and get over the
first shock. When she has had a little time for reflection, a few cool
arguments from me will bring her to reason.'

So it was all to be settled over Louis's passive head; and thus
satisfied, his father, who was exceedingly sorry for him, forgot his
anger, and offered to go home alone as Clara's escort, promising to
return on the Monday, to bring the full force of his remonstrances to
bear down Mary's scruples.

Lord Ormersfield believed Clara too much of a child to have any ideas
on what was passing; and had it depended on him, she must have gone
home in an agony of ignorance on the cause of her cousin's trouble, but
Louis came with them to the station, and contrived to say to her while
walking up and down the platform, 'Her father is bitter against me. He
has sent for her, and she is going!'

Clara looked mutely in his face, with a sort of inqui