‘I request you to let him enter the house.  Do you consent or not?’

‘He was refused once at these doors.  Do you refuse him a second time?’

‘I do.’

‘You mean that?’

‘I am obliged to.’

‘You won’t yield a step to me?’

‘I cannot.’

The spirit of an armed champion was behind those mild features, soft almost to supplication to me, that I might know her to be under a constraint.  The nether lip dropped in breathing, the eyes wavered:  such was her appearance in open war with me, but her will was firm.

Of course I was not so dense as to be unable to perceive her grounds for refusing.

She would not throw the burden on her grandada, even to propitiate me—­the man she still loved.

But that she should have a reason, and think it good, in spite of me, and cling to it, defying me, and that she should do hurt to a sentient human creature, who was my father, for the sake of blindly obeying to the letter the injunction of the dead, were intolerable offences to me and common humanity.  I, for my own part, would have forgiven her, as I congratulated myself upon reflecting.  It was on her account—­to open her mind, to enlighten her concerning right and wrong determination, to bring her feelings to bear upon a crude judgement—­that I condescended to argue the case.  Smarting with admiration, both of the depths and shallows of her character, and of her fine figure, I began:—­She was to consider how young she was to pretend to decide on the balance of duties, how little of the world she had seen; an oath sworn at the bedside of the dead was a solemn thing, but was it Christian to keep it to do an unnecessary cruelty to the living? if she had not studied philosophy, she might at least discern the difference between just resolves and insane—­between those the soul sanctioned, and those hateful to nature; to bind oneself to carry on another person’s vindictiveness was voluntarily to adopt slavery; this was flatly-avowed insanity, and so forth, with an emphatic display of patience.

The truth of my words could not be controverted.  Unhappily I confounded right speaking with right acting, and conceived, because I spoke so justly, that I was specially approved in pressing her to yield.

She broke the first pause to say, ’It’s useless, Harry.  I do what I think I am bound to do.’

‘Then I have spoken to no purpose!’

‘If you will only be kind, and wait two or three days?’

‘Be sensible!’

‘I am, as much as I can be.’

’Hard as a flint—­you always were!  The most grateful woman alive, I admit.  I know not another, I assure you, Janet, who, in return for millions of money, would do such a piece of wanton cruelty.  What!  You think he was not punished enough when he was berated and torn to shreds in your presence?  They would be cruel, perhaps—­we will suppose it of your sex—­but not so fond of their consciences as to stamp a life out to keep an oath.  I forget the terms of the Will.  Were you enjoined in it to force him away?’