Blessed is the man who does not know when he is beaten.

Seeing her father’s kindly humor, Dorothy said:—­

“Father, do you still wish me to remain a prisoner in my rooms?”

“If you promise to be a good, obedient daughter,” returned Sir George, “you shall have your liberty.”

“I have always been that, father, and I am too old to learn otherwise,” answered this girl, whose father had taught her deception by his violence.  You may drive men, but you cannot drive any woman who is worth possessing.  You may for a time think you drive her, but in the end she will have her way.

Dorothy’s first act of obedience after regaining liberty was to send a letter to Manners by the hand of Jennie Faxton.

John received the letter in the evening, and all next day he passed the time whistling, singing, and looking now and again at his horologue.  He walked about the castle like a happy wolf in a pen.  He did not tell me there was a project on foot, with Dorothy as the objective, but I knew it, and waited with some impatience for the outcome.

Long before the appointed time, which was sunset, John galloped forth for Bowling Green Gate with joy and anticipation in his heart and pain in his conscience.  As he rode, he resolved again and again that the interview toward which he was hastening should be the last he would have with Dorothy.  But when he pictured the girl to himself, and thought upon her marvellous beauty and infinite winsomeness, his conscience was drowned in his longing, and he resolved that he would postpone resolving until the morrow.

John hitched his horse near the gate and stood looking between the massive iron bars toward Haddon Hall, whose turrets could be seen through the leafless boughs of the trees.  The sun was sinking perilously low, thought John, and with each moment his heart also sank, while his good resolutions showed the flimsy fibre of their fabric and were rent asunder by the fear that she might not come.  As the moments dragged on and she did not come, a hundred alarms tormented him.  First among these was a dread that she might have made resolves such as had sprung up so plenteously in him, and that she might have been strong enough to act upon them and to remain at home.  But he was mistaken in the girl.  Such resolutions as he had been making and breaking had never come to her at all.  The difference between the man and the woman was this:  he resolved in his mind not to see her and failed in keeping to his resolution; while she resolved in her heart to see him—­resolved that nothing in heaven or earth or the other place could keep her from seeing him, and succeeded in carrying out her resolution.  The intuitive resolve, the one that does not know it is a resolution, is the sort before which obstacles fall like corn before the sickle.