‘Oh! you come in with your infernal fine language, do you!’ the old man thundered at me.  ’I ‘ll just tell you at once, young fellow—­’

My aunt Dorothy supplicated his attention.  ‘One error I must correct.’  Her voice issued from a contracted throat, and was painfully thin and straining, as though the will to speak did violence to her weaker nature.  ’My sister loved Mr. Richmond.  It was to save her life, because I believed she loved him much and would have died, that Mr. Richmond—­in pity—­offered her his hand, at my wish’:  she bent her head:  ’at my cost.  It was done for me.  I wished it; he obeyed me.  No blame—­’ her dear mouth faltered.  ‘I am to be accused, if anybody.’

She added more firmly:  ’My money would have been his.  I hoped to spare his feelings, I beg his forgiveness now, by devoting some of it, unknown to him, to assist him.  That was chiefly to please myself, I see, and I am punished.’

‘Well, ma’am,’ said the squire, calm at white heat; ’a fool’s confession ought to be heard out to the end.  What about the twenty-five thousand?’

‘I hoped to help my Harry.’

‘Why didn’t you do it openly?’

She breathed audible long breaths before she could summon courage to say:  ’His father was going to make an irreparable sacrifice.  I feared that if he knew this money came from me he would reject it, and persist.’

Had she disliked the idea of my father’s marrying?

The old man pounced on the word sacrifice.  ’What sacrifice, ma’am?  What’s the sacrifice?’

I perceived that she could not without anguish, and perhaps peril of a further exposure, bring herself to speak, and explained:  ’It relates to my having tried to persuade my father to marry a very wealthy lady, so that he might produce the money on the day appointed.  Rail at me, sir, as much as you like.  If you can’t understand the circumstances without a chapter of statements, I’m sorry for you.  A great deal is due to you, I know; but I can’t pay a jot of it while you go on rating my father like a madman.’

‘Harry!’ either my aunt or Janet breathed a warning.

I replied that I was past mincing phrases.  The folly of giving the tongue an airing was upon me:  I was in fact invited to continue, and animated to do it thoroughly, by the old man’s expression of face, which was that of one who says, ‘I give you rope,’ and I dealt him a liberal amount of stock irony not worth repeating; things that any cultivated man in anger can drill and sting the Boeotian with, under the delusion that he has not lost a particle of his self-command because of his coolness.  I spoke very deliberately, and therefore supposed that the words of composure were those of prudent sense.  The error was manifest.  The women saw it.  One who has indulged his soul in invective will not, if he has power in his hand, be robbed of his climax with impunity by a cool response that seems to trifle, and scourges.