’She sent for him, at my request, late last night.  She believed her influence would be decisive.  So do I. She could not even make the man perceive that he was acting—­to use her poor dear old-fashioned word—­reprehensibly in frightening the prince to further your interests.  From what I gathered he went off in a song about them.  She said he talked so well!  And aunty Dorothy, too!  I should nearly as soon have expected grandada to come in for his turn of the delusion.  How I wish he was here!  Uberly goes by the first boat to bring him down.  I feel with Miss Goodwin that it will be a disgrace for all of us—­the country’s disgrace.  As for our family! . . .  Harry, and your name!  Good-bye.  Do your best.’

I was in the mood to ask, ‘On behalf of the country?’ She had, however, a glow and a ringing articulation in her excitement that forbade trifling; a minute’s reflection set me weighing my power of will against my father’s.  I nodded to her.

‘Come to us when you are at liberty,’ she called.

I have said that I weighed my power of will against my father’s.  Contemplation of the state of the scales did not send me striding to meet him.  Let it be remembered—­I had it strongly in memory that he habitually deluded himself under the supposition that the turn of all events having an aspect of good fortune had been planned by him of old, and were offered to him as the legitimately-won fruits of a politic life.  While others deemed him mad, or merely reckless, wild, a creature living for the day, he enjoyed the conceit of being a profound schemer, in which he was fortified by a really extraordinary adroitness to take advantage of occurrences:  and because he was prompt in an emergency, and quick to profit of a crisis, he was deluded to imagine that he had created it.  Such a man would be with difficulty brought to surrender his prize.

Again, there was his love for me.  ‘Pater est, Pamphile;—­difficile est.’  How was this vast conceit of a not unreal paternal love to be encountered?  The sense of honour and of decency might appeal to him personally; would either of them get a hearing if he fancied them to be standing in opposition to my dearest interests?  I, unhappily, as the case would be sure to present itself to him, appeared the living example of his eminently politic career.  After establishing me the heir of one of the wealthiest of English commoners, would he be likely to forego any desperate chance of ennobling me by the brilliant marriage?  His dreadful devotion to me extinguished the hope that he would, unless I should happen to be particularly masterful in dealing with him.  I heard his nimble and overwhelming volubility like a flood advancing.  That could be withstood, and his arguments and persuasions.  But by what steps could I restrain the man himself?  I said ‘the man,’ as Janet did.  He figured in my apprehensive imagination as an engine more than as an individual.  Lassitude oppressed