“Nephew Douglas,” he said.  “I am becoming an old man, and to-day I will release myself from the burden of your affairs once and for all.  This is the woman, my daughter Joan, whom I have chosen to wife for thee.  Take her hand and let thy word be pledged to her.”

If silence still reigned in that gloomy apartment, it was because there were those present whom surprise had deprived of speech.  The very image of her father, Joan looked steadily into her cousin’s face without tremor or nervousness.  Her features were shapely enough, but too large and severe for a woman, her wealth of black hair was brushed fiat back from her forehead in uncompromising ugliness.  Her figure was as straight as a dart, but without lines or curves, her gown, of homely stuff and ill-made, completed her unattractiveness.  There was neither blush nor tremor, nor any sign of softening in her cold eyes.  Then Douglas, in whom were already sown the seeds of a passionate discontent with the narrowing lines of his unlovely life, who on the hillside and in the sweet night solitudes had taken Shelley to his heart, had lived with Keats and had felt his pulses beat thickly to the passionate love music of Tennyson, stood silent and unresponsive.  Child of charity he might be, but the burden of his servitude was fast growing too heavy for him.  So he stood there whilst the old man’s eyes flashed like steel, and Joan’s face, in her silent anger, seemed to grow into the likeness of her father’s.

“Dost hear, nephew Douglas?  Take her hands in thine and thank thy God who has sent thee, a pauper and a youth of ill-parentage, a daughter of mine for wife.”

Then the young man found words, though they sounded to him and to the others faint and unimpressive.

“Uncle,” he said, “there has been no word of this nor any thought of it between Joan and myself.  I am not old enough to marry nor have I the inclination.”

Terrible was the look flashed down upon him from those relentless eyes-fierce, too, the words of his reply, measured and slow although they were.

“There is no need for words between thee and Joan.  Choose between my bidding and the outside o’ my doors this night and for ever.”

Even then he might have won his freedom like a man.  But the old dread was too deeply engrafted.  The chains of servitude which he and the whole neighbourhood wore were too heavy to be thrown lightly aside.  So he held out his hand, and Joan’s fingers, passive and cold, lay for a moment in his.  The old man watched without any outward sign of satisfaction.

“Thou ha’ chosen well, nephew Douglas,” he said, with marvellous but quite unconscious irony.  “I reckon, too, that we ha’ chosen well to elect you our pastor.  Thou wilt have two pounds a week and Bailiff Morrison’s cottage.  Neighbour Magee, there is a sup o’ ale and some tea in the kitchen.”

John Magee and William Bull betrayed the first signs of real interest they had exhibited in the proceedings.  One by one they all filed out of the room save Douglas Guest and Joan.  Cicely had flitted away with the first.  They two were alone.  He wondered, with a grim sense of the humour of the thing, whether she was expecting any love-making to follow upon so strange an engagement.  He looked curiously at her.  There was no change in her face nor any sign of softening.