poverty, and knows the rubs of life. I 've no patience with you, d--n me
if I have!"

"A little more of this, and I 'll have none with you," said Dalton, as
he clenched his fist, and struck his knee a hard blow. "You presume to
talk of us as people whose station was always what our present means
imply; but I 'd have you to know that we 've better blood in our veins--"

"Devil take your blood! you've made me spill mine again," cried
Grounsell, as he sliced a piece off his chin, and threw down the
razor in a torrent of anger, while Dalton grinned a look of malicious
satisfaction. "Could n't your good blood have kept you above anything
like dependence?"

Dalton sprang to his feet, and clutching the chair, raised it in the
air; but as suddenly dashed it on the floor again, without speaking.

"Go on," cried Grounsell, daring him. "I'd rather you 'd break my skull
than that dear girl's heart; and that 's what you 're bent on. Ay, break
her heart! no less. You can't terrify me, man, by those angry looks. You
can't wound me, either, by retaliating, and calling me a dependant. I
know I am such. I know well all the ignominy, all the shame; but I know,
too, all the misery of the position. But, mark me, the disgrace and the
sorrow end where they begin, with myself alone. I have none to blush
for me; I stand alone in the world, a poor, scathed, sapless, leafless
trunk. But it is not so with you. Come, come, Dalton, you fancy that you
know something of life because you have passed so many years of it among
your equals and neighbors in your own 'country; but you know nothing
absolutely nothing of the world as it exists here."

A hearty but contemptuous laugh broke from Dalton as he heard this
speech. It was indeed somewhat of a surprise to listen to such a charge.
He, Peter Dalton, that knew a spavined horse, or could detect a windgall
better than any man in the county; he, that never was "taken in" by a
roarer, nor deceived by a crib-biter, to tell him that he knew nothing
of life!

"That'll do, doctor, that'll do," said he, with a most compassionating
smile at the other's ignorance. "I hope you know more about medicine
than you seem to do about men and women;" and, with these words, he left
the room, banging the door after him as he went, and actually ashamed
that he had been betrayed into warmth by one so evidently deficient in
the commonest knowledge of the world.

[Illustration: 228]

"I 'm sorry I kept you waiting,