exert your universally—­deservedly acknowledged influence.  Even now—­and you frown on me!—­I cannot find it in my heart to wish you the sweet and admirable woman of the world you are destined to be, though you would comprehend me and applaud me, for I could not—­no, not to win your favourable opinion! —­consent that you should be robbed of a single ray of your fresh maidenly youth.  If you must misjudge me, I submit.  It is the price I pay for seeing you young and lovely.  Prince Ernest is, credit me, not unworthily treated by me, if life is a battle, and the prize of it to the General’s head.  I implore you’—­he lured her with the dimple of a lurking smile—­’do not seriously blame your afflicted senior, if we are to differ.  I am vastly your elder:  you instil the doubt whether I am by as much the wiser of the two; but the father of Harry Richmond claims to know best what will ensure his boy’s felicity.  Is he rash?  Pronounce me guilty of an excessive anxiety for my son’s welfare; say that I am too old to read the world with the accuracy of a youthful intelligence:  call me indiscreet:  stigmatize me unlucky; the severest sentence a judge’—­he bowed to her deferentially—­’can utter; only do not cast a gaze of rebuke on me because my labour is for my son—­my utmost devotion.  And we know, Miss Ilchester, that the princess honours him with her love.  I protest in all candour, I treat love as love; not as a weight in the scale; it is the heavenly power which dispenses with weighing! its ascendancy . . .’

The squire could endure no more, and happily so, for my father was losing his remarkably moderated tone, and threatening polysyllables.  He had followed Janet, step for step, at a measured distance, drooping toward her with his winningest air, while the old man pulled at her arm to get her out of hearing of the obnoxious flatterer.  She kept her long head in profile, trying creditably not to appear discourteous to one who addressed her by showing an open ear, until the final bolt made by the frenzied old man dragged her through the doorway.  His neck was shortened behind his collar as though he shrugged from the blast of a bad wind.  I believe that, on the whole, Janet was pleased.  I will wager that, left to herself, she would have been drawn into an answer, if not an argument.  Nothing would have made her resolution swerve, I admit.

They had not been out of the room three seconds when my aunt Dorothy was called to join them.  She had found time to say that she hoped the money was intact.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

All passed too swift for happiness
He clearly could not learn from misfortune
Intimations of cowardice menacing a paralysis of the will
Like a woman, who would and would not, and wanted a master
One in a temper at a time I’m sure ’s enough
Simple affection must bear the strain of friendship if it can
Stand not in my way, nor follow me too far