“It shall come with no risk, Kate, believe me, none.  Heaven forbid that I should bring a solitary grief to your bosom; yet it may adventure in some respects both mind and person, if you be not wary.  Knowing your father, as you know him too, I would have from you a pledge—­a promise, here, solemnly uttered in the eye of Heaven, and in the holy stillness of this place, which has witnessed other of our vows no less sacred and solemn, that, should he sanction the prayer of another who seeks your love, and command your obedience, that you will not obey—­that you will not go quietly a victim to the altar—­that you will not pledge to another the same vow which has been long since pledged to me.”

He paused a moment for a reply, but she spoke not; and with something like impetuosity he proceeded:—­

“You make no reply, Katharine?  You hear my entreaty—­my prayer.  It involves no impropriety; it stands in the way of no other duty, since, I trust, the relationship between us is as binding as any other which may call for your regard.  All that I ask is, that you will not dispose of yourself to another, your heart not going with your hand, whatever may be the authority which may require it; at least, not until you are fully assured that it is beyond my power to claim you, or I become unworthy to press the claim.”

“It is strange, Mark, that you should speak in a manner of which there is so little need.  The pledge long since uttered as solemnly as you now require, under these very boughs, should satisfy you.”

“So it should, Kate—­and so it would, perhaps, could I now reason on any subject.  But my doubts are not now of your love, but of your firmness in resisting a control at variance with your duty to yourself.  Your words reassure me, however; and now, though with no glad heart, I shall pass over the border, and hope for the better days which are to make us happy.”

“Not so fast, Master Forrester,” exclaimed the voice of old Allen, emerging from the cover of the sycamore, to the shelter of which he had advanced unobserved, and had been the unsuspected auditor of the dialogue from first to last.  The couple, with an awkward consciousness, started up at the speech, taken by surprise, and neither uttering a word in reply to this sudden address.

“You must first answer, young man, to the charge of advising my daughter to disobedience, as I have heard you for the last half hour; and to elopement, which she had the good sense to refuse.  I thought, Master Forrester, that you were better bred than to be guilty of such offences.”

“I know them not as such, Mr. Allen.  I had your own sanction to my engagement with Katharine, and do not see that after that you had any right to break it off.”

“You do not—­eh?  Well, perhaps, you are right, and I have thought better of the matter myself; and, between us, Kate has behaved so well, and spoken so prettily to you, and obeyed my orders, as she should have done, that I’m thinking to look more kindly on the whole affair.”