pplication was so shabby and insolent!
What could he take me for? That I should suppose his placing me with Cousin
Monica constituted her my guardian? Why, he must fancy me the merest baby.
There was a kind of stupid cunning in this that disgusted my good-nature
and outraged my self-importance.

'You won't gi'e me that, then?' he said, looking down again, with a frown,
and working his mouth and cheeks about as I could fancy a man rolling a
piece of tobacco in his jaw.

'Certainly _not_, sir,' I replied.

'_Take_ it, then,' he replied, still looking down, very black and
discontented.

I joined Mary Quince, extremely angry. As I passed under the carved oak
arch of the vestibule, I saw his figure in the deepening twilight. The
picture remains in its murky halo fixed in memory. Standing where he last
spoke in the centre of the hall, not looking after me, but downward, and,
as well as I could see, with the countenance of a man who has lost a game,
and a ruinous wager too--that is black and desperate. I did not utter a
syllable on the way up. When I reached my room, I began to reconsider the
interview more at my leisure. I was, such were my ruminations, to have
agreed at once to his preposterous offer, and to have been driven, while he
smirked and grimaced behind my back at his acquaintances, through Feltram
in his dog-cart to Elverston; and then, to the just indignation of my
uncle, to have been delivered up to Lady Knolly's guardianship, and to
have handed my driver, as I alighted, the handsome fare of 20.000_l_. It
required the impudence of Tony Lumpkin, without either his fun or his
shrewdness, to have conceived such a prodigious practical joke.

'Maybe you'd like a little tea, Miss?' insinuated Mary Quince.

'What impertinence!' I exclaimed, with one of my angry stamps on the floor.
'Not you, dear old Quince,' I added. 'No--no tea just now.'

And I resumed my ruminations, which soon led me to this train of
thought--'Stupid and insulting as Dudley's proposition was, it yet involved
a great treason against my uncle. Should I be weak enough to be silent, may
he not, wishing to forestall me, misrepresent all that has passed, so as to
throw the blame altogether upon me?'

This idea seized upon me with a force which I could not withstand; and on
the impulse of the moment I obtained admission to my uncle, and related
exactly what had passed. When I had finished my narrative, which he
listened to without once raising his