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.

“You are not cruel.  I knew it.  I should have died, if you had come between us.  Oh, Wilfrid’s father, I love you!—­I have never had a very angry word on my mouth.  Think! think! if you had made me curse you.  For, I could!  You would have stopped my life, and Wilfrid’s.  What would our last thoughts have been?  We could not have forgiven you.  Take up dead birds killed by frost.  You cry:  Cruel winter! murdering cold!  But I knew better.  You are Wilfrid’s father, whom I can kneel to.  My lover’s father! my own father! my friend next to heaven!  Oh! bless my love, for him.  You have only to know what my love for him is!  The thought of losing him goes like perishing cold through my bones;—­my heart jerks, as if it had to pull up my body from the grave every time it beats....”

“God in heaven!” cried the horrified merchant, on whose susceptible nerves these images wrought with such a force that he absolutely had dread of her.  He gasped, and felt at his heart, and then at his pulse; rubbed the moisture from his forehead, and throwing a fixedly wild look on her eyes, he jumped up and left her kneeling.

His caress had implied mercy to Emilia:  for she could not reconcile it with the rejection of the petition of her soul.  She was now a little bewildered to see him trotting the room, frowning and blinking, and feeling at one wrist, at momentary pauses, all his words being:  “Let’s be quiet.  Let’s be good.  Let’s go to bed, and say our prayers;” mingled with short ejaculations.