n for the miller's daughter. It must be admitted that for once
the inexorable parent may have been in the right. Tales had reached him,
unhappily too late to prevent the formation of an acquaintance between
the young squires and his daughters, of the profligacies--dissoluteness
with women and at the gaming-table--of both these young men. And it is
little wonder that he resolutely opposed the union of Thornton and
Maisie--she a girl of nineteen!--at least until there was some sign of
reform in the youth, some turning from his evil ways.

It was a sad thing for Maisie that her father's exclusiveness had
created so many obstacles to the associations of his daughters with
older women. No one had ever taken the place of a mother to them. It is
rare enough for even a mother to speak explicitly to her daughter of
what folk mean when they tell of the risks a girl runs who weds with a
man like Thornton Daverill. But she may do so in such a way as to excite
suspicion of the reality, and it is hard on motherless girls that they
should not have this slender chance. A father can do nothing, and old
fulminations of well-worn Scriptural jargon--hers was an adept in
texts--had not even the force of their brutal plain speech. For to these
girls the speech was not plain--it was only what Parson read in Church.
That described and exhausted it.

The rest of the story follows naturally--too naturally--from the
position shown in the above hasty sketch. Old Isaac Runciman's
ill-temper, combined with an almost ludicrous want of tact, took the
form of forbidding Thornton Daverill the house. The student of the art
of dragging lovers asunder cannot be too mindful of the fact that the
more they see of each other, the sooner they will be ripe for
separation. If Maisie had been difficult to influence when her father
contented himself with saying that he forbade the marriage _ex cathedra
paternae auctoritatis_, she became absolutely intractable when, some time
after, this authority went the length of interdicting communications.
Secret interviews, about double the length of the public ones they
supplanted, gave the indignant parent an excuse for locking the girl
into her own room. All worked well for the purpose of a thoroughly
unprincipled scoundrel. Thornton, who would probably have married Maisie
if nothing but legal possession had been open to him, saw his way to the
same advantages without the responsibilities of marriage, and jumped at
them. D