“By Jove, Dorothy! if you continue to torment that poor child with your eternal sermons, you will compel me to send you from the house.”

“A very fitting return for all my services,” whimpered Miss Dorothy; “for all the love and care I have bestowed upon you and your ungrateful daughter!  Send me from the house—­turn me out of doors! Me, at my time of life;” using that for argument’s sake which, if addressed to her by another, would have been refuted with indignation; “to send me forth into the world, homeless and friendless, to seek my living among strangers!  Brother, brother, have you the heart to address this to me?”

“Well, perhaps I was wrong, Dolly,” replied the kind-hearted sailor, repenting of his sudden burst of passion; “but you do so provoke me by your ill-humor, your eternal contradiction, and your old-maidish ways, that it is impossible for a man always to keep his temper.  It’s a hard thing for a fellow’s wife to have the command of the ship, but it seems deucedly unnatural for him to be ruled by a sister.”

“Is it not enough, brother, to make a virtuous woman angry, when she hears the girl, whose morals she has fostered with such care, defending a wicked profligate wretch like Anthony Hurdlestone?”

“Excuse me, aunt, I did not defend his conduct, supposing him guilty,” said Juliet, with quiet dignity; “for if that be really the case such conduct is indefensible.  I only hoped that we had been mistaken.”

“Pshaw, girl!  You are too credulous,” said her father.  “I have no doubt of his guilt.  But here is Mr. Godfrey; we may learn the truth from him.”

With an air of the deepest concern, Godfrey listened to the Captain’s indignant recital of the scene he had witnessed in the park, and with his uncle Mark’s duplicity (only Godfrey was a laughing villain, always the most dangerous sinner of the two) he affected to commiserate the folly and weakness of his cousin, in suffering himself to be entangled by an artful girl.

“He is a strange lad, a very strange lad, Captain Whitmore.  I have known him from a child, but I don’t know what to make of him.  His father is a bad man, and it would be strange if he did not inherit some of his propensities.”

“Weaknesses of this nature were not among his father’s faults,” said the Captain.  “I must confess that I liked the young man, and he had, I am told, a very amiable and beautiful mother.”

“I have heard my father say so—­but she was his first love, and love is always blind.  I should think very little of the moral worth of a woman who would jilt such a man as my father, to marry a selfish miserly wretch like Mark Hurdlestone for his money.”

“You are right, Mr. Hurdlestone,” said Juliet.  “Such a woman was unworthy of your father.  Poor Anthony, he has been very unfortunate in his parents; yet I hoped of him better things.”

“You think, Mr. Godfrey, that there is no doubt of his guilt?” asked Miss Dorothy.