My cousin’s conduct may appear to have been an inadequate cause for such serious uneasiness; but my alarm was awakened neither by his acts nor by words, but entirely by his manner, which was strange and even intimidating.  At the beginning of our yesterday’s interview, there was a sort of bullying swagger in his air, which, towards the end, gave place to something bordering upon the brutal vehemence of an undisguised ruffian, a transition which had tempted me into a belief that he might seek, even forcibly, to extort from me a consent to his wishes, or by means still more horrible, of which I scarcely dared to trust myself to think, to possess himself of my property.

I was early next day summoned to attend my uncle in his private room, which lay in a corner turret of the old building; and thither I accordingly went, wondering all the way what this unusual measure might prelude.  When I entered the room, he did not rise in his usual courteous way to greet me, but simply pointed to a chair opposite to his own; this boded nothing agreeable.  I sat down, however, silently waiting until he should open the conversation.

“Lady Margaret,” at length he said, in a tone of greater sternness than I thought him capable of using, “I have hitherto spoken to you as a friend, but I have not forgotten that I am also your guardian, and that my authority as such gives me a right to controul your conduct.  I shall put a question to you, and I expect and will demand a plain, direct answer.  Have I rightly been informed that you have contemptuously rejected the suit and hand of my son Edward?”

I stammered forth with a good deal of trepidation:—­

“I believe, that is, I have, sir, rejected my cousin’s proposals; and my coldness and discouragement might have convinced him that I had determined to do so.”

“Madame,” replied he, with suppressed, but, as it appeared to me, intense anger, “I have lived long enough to know that coldness and discouragement, and such terms, form the common cant of a worthless coquette.  You know to the full, as well as I, that coldness and discouragement may be so exhibited as to convince their object that he is neither distasteful nor indifferent to the person who wears that manner.  You know, too, none better, that an affected neglect, when skillfully managed, is amongst the most formidable of the allurements which artful beauty can employ.  I tell you, madame, that having, without one word spoken in discouragement, permitted my son’s most marked attentions for a twelvemonth or more, you have no right to dismiss him with no further explanation than demurely telling him that you had always looked coldly upon him, and neither your wealth nor your ladyship (there was an emphasis of scorn on the word which would have become Sir Giles Overreach himself) can warrant you in treating with contempt the affectionate regard of an honest heart.”

I was too much shocked at this undisguised attempt to bully me into an acquiescence in the interested and unprincipled plan for their own aggrandisement, which I now perceived my uncle and his son had deliberately formed, at once to find strength or collectedness to frame an answer to what he had said.  At length I replied, with a firmness that surprised myself:—­