Perhaps for ten minutes she remained thus, then a great crash from the near heavens caused her to look up.  It was raining, had rained since she sat there, though she had not known it.  In the little pool before her great drops splashed and made a miniature tempest.  The yellow flower she had plucked lay close by, and was beaten by the rain.  It lightened vividly, and there followed heavier thunder than before.

She wished to shed tears—­tears were choking her, but would not rise and shed themselves; she could only sob, aloud, hysterically.  The words ‘Father’ and ‘Wilfrid’ broke from her lips several times.  Was there red-hot metal poured upon her forehead?

It cost her a great effort to rise and walk homewards.  The rain streamed down, but she could no longer hasten.  Still she reached the house before her mother’s return from church, and she was glad of that.

CHAPTER XIII

THE CUTTING OF THE KNOT

For the final failure of his plot Dagworthy was in no wise prepared.  He had anticipated prolonged scenes, passionate pleadings, appeals to his better nature, and to his shame; but that his threat should prove ineffectual was not among his fears.  Illustrating a well-known tendency of human nature, his reckless egoism based its confidence on the presumed existence of heroic self-devotion in his victim.  Starting from a knowledge of the close affection between Emily and her father, the logic of desire had abundant arguments to prove that the girl must and could act in but one way.  Dagworthy’s was not an original mind; the self-immolation of daughters (not of sons) on their parents’ behalf is among vulgar conceptions of the befitting, and it is more than probable that the mill-owner was half-consciously supported by precedents drawn from his readings in popular fiction.  His imagination, as is commonly the case, was only strong in the direction of his wishes; neglecting Emily’s avowed attachment to an accepted lover—­whose shadowiness made him difficult to realise even as an obstacle—­he dwelt persistently on the thought of Hood’s position, and found it impossible to imagine a refusal on Emily’s part to avert from her father the direst of calamities.  That other motive, the strength of which in Emily was independent of her plighted troth, was not within the range of his conceptions; that a woman should face martyrdom rather than marry without love was a contingency alien to his experience and to the philosophy wherewith nature had endowed him.  In spite of the attributes of nobleness which so impressed him in the object of his love, Dagworthy could give no credit to the utterance of such a feeling.  Whilst Emily spoke, he was for the moment overcome by a vision of vague glories; reflecting on her words, he interpreted them as merely emphasising her determination to wed one only.  Their effect was to give new food to his jealousy.