“I never thought you would bring my words up that way.  But I’ll tell you one thing, my girls are not made of melted wax, William.  You’ll be a wise man, and a strong man, if you get a ring on their fingers, if they don’t want it there.  Sophia will say very soft and sweet, ’No, thank you, father;’ and you’ll move Scawfell and Langdale Pikes before you get her beyond it.  As for Charlotte, you yourself will stand ‘making’ better than she will.  And you know that nothing short of an earthquake can lift you an inch outside your own way.”

And perhaps Sandal thought the hyperbole a compliment; for he smiled a little, and walked away, with what his wife privately called “a peacocky air,” saying something about “Greek meeting Greek” as he did so.  Mrs. Sandal did not in the least understand him:  she wondered a little over the remark, and then dismissed it as “some of the squire’s foolishness.”

CHAPTER III.

JULIUS SANDAL.

     “Variety’s the very spice of life
      That gives it all its flavor.”

     “Domestic happiness, thou only bliss
      Of Paradise that has survived the fall.”

Life has a chronology quite independent of the almanac.  The heart divides it into periods.  When the sheep-shearing had been forgotten by all others, the squire often looked back to it with longing.  It was a boundary which he could never repass, and which shut him out forever from the happy days of his daughters’ girlhood,—­the days when they had no will but his will, and no pleasures but in his smile and companionship.  His son Harry had never been to him what Sophia and Charlotte were.  Harry had spent his boyhood in public schools, and, when his education was completed, had defied all the Sandal traditions, and gone into the army.  At this time he was with his regiment,—­the old Cameronian,—­in Edinburgh.  And in other points, besides his choice of the military profession, Harry had asserted his will against his father’s will.  But the squire’s daughters gave him nothing but delight.  He was proud of their beauty, proud of Charlotte’s love of out-door pleasures, proud of Sophia’s love of books; and he was immeasurably happy in their affection and obedience.

If Sandal had been really a wise man he would have been content with his good fortune; and like the happy Corinthian have only prayed, “O goddess, let the days of my prosperity continue!” But he had the self-sufficiency and impatience of a man who is without peer in his own small arena.  He believed himself to be as capable of ordering his daughters’ lives as of directing his sheep “walks,” or the change of crops in his valley and upland meadows.