She laughed.

“Oh! you must speak to Sir John about that.  Now listen; I am going to surprise you.  Your cousin wants to get married.”

“Get married!  George wants to get married!”

“Exactly so; and now I have a further surprise in store for you—­he wants to marry your daughter Angela.”

This time Philip said nothing, but he started in evident and uncomfortable astonishment.  If Lady Bellamy wished to surprise him, she had certainly succeeded.

“Surely you are joking!” he said.

“I never was further from joking in my life; he is desperately in love with her, and wild to marry her.”

“Well?”

“Well, don’t you now see a way to force your cousin to sell the lands?”

“At the price of Angela’s hand?”

“Precisely.”

Philip walked up and down the room in thought.  Though, as the reader may remember, he had himself, but a month before, been base enough to suggest that his daughter should use her eyes to forward his projects, he had never, in justice to him be it said, dreamt of forcing her into a marriage in every way little less than unnatural.  His idea of responsibility towards his daughter was, as regards sins of omission, extremely lax, but there were some of commission that he did not care to face.  Certain fears and memories oppressed him too much to allow of it.

“Lady Bellamy,” he said, presently, “you have known my cousin George intimately for many years, and are probably sufficiently acquainted with his habits of life to know that such a marriage would be an infamy.”

“Many a man who has been wild in his youth makes a good husband,” she answered, quietly.

“The more I think of it,” went on Philip, excitedly, after the fashion of one who would lash himself into a passion, “the more I see the utter impossibility of any such thing, and I must say that I wonder at your having undertaken such an errand.  On the one hand, there is a young girl who, though I do not, from force of circumstances, see much of myself, is, I believe, as good as she is handsome——­”

“And on the other,” broke in Lady Bellamy, ironically, “are the Isleworth estates.”

“And on the other,” went on Philip, without paying heed to her remark —­“I am going to speak plainly, Lady Bellamy—­is a man utterly devoid of the foundations of moral character, whose appearance is certainly against him, who I have got reason to know is not to be trusted, and who is old enough to be her father, and her cousin to boot—­and you ask me to forward such a marriage as this!  I will have nothing to do with it; my responsibilities as a father forbid it.  It would be the wickedest thing I have ever done to put the girl into the power of such a man.”

Lady Bellamy burst into a low peal of laughter; she never laughed aloud.  She thought that it was now time to throw him a little off his balance.

“Forgive me,” she said, with her sweetest smile, “but you must admit that there is something rather ludicrous in hearing the hero of the great Maria Lee scandal talking about moral character, and the father who detests his daughter so much that he fears to look her in the face, and whose sole object is to rid himself of an encumbrance, prating of his paternal responsibilities.”