“She’s saving all her powers for to-morrow,” thought Jane’s parent; and she was.  She slept according to her custom, like a dormouse, and woke refreshed to put up the fight of her life.  They got to it after breakfast, when the house-place was empty, and Warner soon found that, if he were to have his will, ’twould be needful to call on Heaven to help him.

Jane didn’t waste no time, and if her father had astonished her, she had quite so fine a surprise for him after she’d thought it all over and collected herself.

“’Tis in a nutshell,” she said.  “All my life I’ve put you afore everything on earth but my Maker, and I was minded so to continue.  I’ve been everything any daughter ever was to a father, and you have stood to me for my waking and sleeping thought ever since I could think at all.  And now you want me to go under in my home and see another take my place.  Well, dad, that’s your look-out, of course, and if you think Mrs. Bascombe will be more useful to you than me, then take her.  But I’ll say here and now, please, that if you be going to marry, I shall leave Wych Elm for good and all, because I couldn’t endure for another woman to be over me and closer to your interests than what I am.  Never, never could I endure it.  Is that quite clear?”

He looked at her and filled his tobacco pipe while he done so.

“So clear as can be, Jane,” he said. “’Tis like your fine courage and affection to feel so.  But I make bold to believe you haven’t weighed this come-along-of-it same as I have, and find yourself getting up in the air too soon.  I could no more see Wych Elm without you than I could see myself without you, and the affection I feel for Mrs. Bascombe is on a different footing altogether.  Love of a wife and love of a daughter don’t clash at all.  They be different things, and she would no more come between me and you and our lifelong devotion than love of man would come between you and me.”

He flowed on like that, so clever as need be, and she listened with a face that didn’t show a spark of the thought behind it.  But he failed to move her an inch, because, unknown to him, she’d got a fine trump card up her sleeve, of course.

He saw presently that he wasn’t making no progress and sighed a good bit and turned on a pathetic note, which he had at command, and blew his nose once or twice; but these little touches didn’t move Jane, so he ventured to ask her what her future ideas might be away from Wych Elm, if such a fearful thing was thinkable.

“God, He knows,” said John Warner, “as I never thought to be up against life like this, and find myself called to choose by you, who was the apple of my very eye, between a wife and an only child; but since you can have the heart to come between me and a natural affection towards Mrs. Bascombe, may I venture to ask, dear Jane, what your own plans might be if you could bring yourself to do such a deed as to leave me?”