It mattered little to her what sort of effect on his demeanour her revelation produced, so long as the resolve she sought to bring him to was nailed in his mind; and she was a woman to knock and knock again, till it was firmly fixed there.  With a strong purpose, and no plans, there were few who could resist what, in her circle, she willed; not even a youth who would gaily have marched to the scaffold rather than stand behind a counter.  A purpose wedded to plans may easily suffer shipwreck; but an unfettered purpose that moulds circumstances as they arise, masters us, and is terrible.  Character melts to it, like metal in the steady furnace.  The projector of plots is but a miserable gambler and votary of chances.  Of a far higher quality is the will that can subdue itself to wait, and lay no petty traps for opportunity.  Poets may fable of such a will, that it makes the very heavens conform to it; or, I may add, what is almost equal thereto, one who would be a gentleman, to consent to be a tailor.  The only person who ever held in his course against Mrs. Mel, was Mel,—­her husband; but, with him, she was under the physical fascination of her youth, and it never left her.  In her heart she barely blamed him.  What he did, she took among other inevitable matters.

The door closed upon Evan, and waiting at the foot, of the stairs a minute to hear how he was received, Mrs. Mel went to the kitchen and called the name of Dandy, which brought out an ill-built, low-browed, small man, in a baggy suit of black, who hopped up to her with a surly salute.  Dandy was a bird Mrs. Mel had herself brought down, and she had for him something of a sportsman’s regard for his victim.  Dandy was the cleaner of boots and runner of errands in the household of Melchisedec, having originally entered it on a dark night by the cellar.  Mrs. Mel, on that occasion, was sleeping in her dressing-gown, to be ready to give the gallant night-hawk, her husband, the service he might require on his return to the nest.  Hearing a suspicious noise below, she rose, and deliberately loaded a pair of horse-pistols, weapons Mel had worn in his holsters in the heroic days gone; and with these she stepped downstairs straight to the cellar, carrying a lantern at her girdle.  She could not only load, but present and fire.  Dandy was foremost in stating that she called him forth steadily, three times, before the pistol was discharged.  He admitted that he was frightened, and incapable of speech, at the apparition of the tall, terrific woman.  After the third time of asking he had the ball lodged in his leg and fell.  Mrs. Mel was in the habit of bearing heavier weights than Dandy.  She made no ado about lugging him to a chamber, where, with her own hands (for this woman had some slight knowledge of surgery, and was great in herbs and drugs) she dressed his wound, and put him to bed; crying contempt (ever present in Dandy’s memory) at such a poor creature undertaking the work