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.

CHAPTER LII

STRANGE REVELATIONS, AND MY GRANDFATHER HAS HIS LAST OUTBURST

My father and I stood at different windows, observing the unconcerned people below.

‘Did you scheme to bring Prince Hermann over here as well?’ I asked him.

He replied laughing:  ’I really am not the wonderful wizard you think me, Richie.  I left Prince Ernest’s address as mine with Waddy in case the Frau Feld-Marschall should take it into her head to come.  Further than that you must question Providence, which I humbly thank for its unfailing support, down to unexpected trifles.  Only this—­to you and to all of them:  nothing bends me.  I will not be robbed of the fruit of a lifetime.’

‘Supposing I refuse?’