terness run over. Mr. Newcome was
called in, and the two elders passed a great part of the night in an
assault upon the lad. He was grown too tall for the cane; but Mrs.
Newcome thonged him with the lash of her indignation for many an hour
that evening.

He was forbidden to enter, M. de Blois' house, a prohibition at which
the spirited young fellow snapped his fingers, and laughed in scorn.
Nothing, he swore, but death should part him from the young lady. On the
next day his father came to him alone and plied him with entreaties, but
he was as obdurate as before. He would have her; nothing should prevent
him. He cocked his hat and walked out of the lodge-gate, as his father,
quite beaten by the young man's obstinacy, with haggard face and tearful
eyes, went his own way into town. He was not very angry himself: in the
course of their talk overnight the boy had spoken bravely and honestly,
and Newcome could remember how, in his own early life, he too had
courted and loved a young lass. It was Mrs. Newcome the father was
afraid of. Who shall depict her wrath at the idea that a child of her
house was about to marry a Popish girl?

So young Newcome went his way to Blackheath, bent upon falling
straightway down upon his knees before Leonore, and having the
Chevalier's blessing. That old fiddler in London scarcely seemed to him
to be an obstacle: it seemed monstrous that a young creature should be
given away to a man older than her own father. He did not know the law
of honour, as it obtained amongst French gentlemen of those days, or how
religiously their daughters were bound by it.

But Mrs. Newcome had been beforehand with him, and had visited the
Chevalier de Blois almost at cockcrow. She charged him insolently with
being privy to the attachment between the young people; pursued him
with vulgar rebukes about beggary, Popery, and French adventurers. Her
husband had to make a very contrite apology afterwards for the language
which his wife had thought fit to employ. "You forbid me," said the
Chevalier, "you forbid Mademoiselle de Blois to marry your son, Mr.
Thomas! No, madam, she comes of a race which is not accustomed to ally
itself with persons of your class; and is promised to a gentleman whose
ancestors were dukes and peers when Mr. Newcome's were blacking shoes!"
Instead of finding his pretty blushing girl on arriving at Woolwich,
poor Tom only found his French master, livid with rage and quivering
under his ailes d