said that there could be
no such marriage--because of Marion's health. The glory while it
lasted he had borne meekly, but with a certain anxious satisfaction.
The pride of his life had been in Marion, and this young lord's
choice had justified his pride. But the glory had been very fleeting.
And now it was understood through all Pogson and Littlebird's that
their senior clerk had been crushed, not by the loss of his noble
son-in-law, but by the cause which produced the loss. Under these
circumstances poor Zachary Fay had hardly any will of his own, except
to do that which his daughter suggested to him. When she told him
that she would wish to go up to London for a few days, he assented as
a matter of course. And when she explained that she wished to do so
in order that she might see Lord Hampstead, he only shook his head
sadly, and was silent.

"Of course I will come as you wish it," Marion had said in her letter
to her lover. "What would I not do that you wish,--except when you
wish things that you know you ought not? Mrs. Roden says that I am to
go up to be lectured. You mustn't be very hard upon me. I don't think
you ought to ask me to do things which you know,--which you know that
I cannot do. Oh, my lover! oh, my love! would that it were all over,
and that you were free!"

In answer to this, and to other letters of the kind, he wrote to
her long argumentative epistles, in which he strove to repress the
assurances of his love, in order that he might convince her the
better by the strength of his reasoning. He spoke to her of the will
of God, and of the wickedness of which she would be guilty if she
took upon herself to foretell the doings of Providence. He said much
of the actual bond by which they had tied themselves together in
declaring their mutual love. He endeavoured to explain to her that
she could not be justified in settling such a question for herself
without reference to the opinion of those who must know the world
better than she did. Had the words of a short ceremony been spoken,
she would have been bound to obey him as her husband. Was she not
equally bound now, already, to acknowledge his superiority,--and if
not by him, was it not her manifest duty to be guided by her father?
Then at the end of four carefully-written, well-stuffed pages, there
would come two or three words of burning love. "My Marion, my self,
my very heart!" It need hardly be said that as the well-stuffed pages
went for nothing