o you? You would have to relinquish your title."

"I care nothing about my title," I replied.

"And your position."

"I care nothing about that either."

"Come, come," said the lawyer, patting my arm as if I had been an angry
child on the verge of tears. "Don't let a fit of pique or spleen break
up a marriage that is so suitable from the points of property and
position. And then think of your good father. Why did he spend all that
money in setting a ruined house on its legs again? That he might carry
on his name in a noble family, and through your children, and your
children's children. . . ."

"Then the law can do nothing for me?" I said, feeling sick and sore.

"Sorry, very sorry, but under present conditions, as far as I can yet
see, nothing," said the lawyer.

"Good-day, sir," I said, and before he could have known what I was doing
I had leapt up, left the room, and was hurrying downstairs.

My heart was in still fiercer rebellion now. I would go home. I would
appeal to my father. Hard as he had always been with me he was at least
a man, not a cold abstraction, like the Church and the law, without
bowels of compassion or sense of human suffering.

SIXTIETH CHAPTER

Although I had sent word that I was coming home, there was no one to
welcome me when I arrived.

Aunt Bridget was out shopping, and Betsy Beauty (in the sulks with me,
as I afterwards heard, for not asking her to the house-party) had run
upstairs on hearing our horn, so I went direct to my father's room.

Nessy MacLeod answered my knock, but instead of opening the door to let
me in, she slid out like a cat and closed it behind her. Never had her
ungainly figure, her irregular features, and her red head seemed to me
so repugnant. I saw at once that she was giving herself the airs of
housekeeper, and I noticed that she was wearing the bunch of keys which
used to dangle from Aunt Bridget's waist when I was a child.

"Your father is ill," she said.

I told her I knew that, and it was one of the reasons I was there.

"Seriously ill," she said, standing with her back to the door. "The
doctor says he is to be kept perfectly quiet."

Indignant at the effrontery of the woman who was trying to keep me out
of my father's room, I said:

"Let me pass, please."

"S'sh! He has a temperature, and I don't choose that anybody shall
disturb him to-day."

"Let me pass," I repeated, and I must have pitched my voice so high that
my father heard