To speak at all, and arrange his ideas, was a vexation to the poor merchant.  He was here like an irritable traveller, who knocks at a gate, which makes as if it opens, without letting him in.  Emilia’s naive confidence he read as stupidity.  It brought on a fresh access of the nervous fever lurking in him, and he cried, jumping from his seat:  “Well, you can’t have him, and there’s an end.  You must give up—­confound! why! do you expect to have everything you want at starting?  There, my child—­ but, upon my honour! a man loses his temper at having to talk for an hour or so, and no result.  You must go to bed; and—­do you say your prayers?  Well! that’s one way of getting out of it—­pray that you may forget all about what’s not good for you.  Why, you’re almost like a young man, when you set your mind on a thing.  Bad! won’t do!  Say your prayers regularly.  And, please, pour me out a mouthful of brandy.  My hand trembles—­I don’t know what’s the matter with it;—­just like those rushes on the Thames I used to see when out fishing.  No wind, and yet there they shake away.  I wish it was daylight on the old river now!  It’s night, and no mistake.  I feel as if I had a fellow twirling a stick over my head.  The rascal’s been at it for the last month.  There, stop where you are, my dear.  Don’t begin to dance!”

He pressed at his misty eyes, half under the impression that she was taking a succession of dazzling leaps in air.  Terror of an impending blow, which he associated with Emilia’s voice, made him entreat her to be silent.  After a space, he breathed a long breath of relief, saying:  “No, no; you’re firm enough on your feet.  I don’t think I ever saw you dance.  My girls have given it up.  What led me to think...but, let’s to bed, and say our prayers.  I want a kiss.”

Emilia kissed him on the forehead.  The symptoms of illness were strange to her, and passed unheeded.  She was too full of her own burning passion to take evidence from her sight.  The sun of her world was threatened with extinction.  She felt herself already a wanderer in a land of tombs, where none could say whether morning had come or gone.  Intensely she looked her misery in the face; and it was as a voice that said, “No sun:  never sun any more,” to her.  But a blue-hued moon slipped from among the clouds, and hung in the black outstretched fingers of the tree of darkness, fronting troubled waters.  “This is thy light for ever! thou shalt live in thy dream.”  So, as in a prison-house, did her soul now recall the blissful hours by Wilming Weir.  She sickened but an instant.  The blood in her veins was too strong a tide for her to crouch in that imagined corpse-like universe which alternates with an irradiated Eden in the brain of the passionate young.

“Why should I lose him!” The dry sob choked her.

She struggled with the emotion in her throat, and Mr. Pole, who had previously dreaded supplication and appeals for pity, caressed her.  Instantly the flood poured out.