“You are my friend.  Only you speak in irony so much.  That was irony, about my clear conscience.  I spoke to you and to Miss Dale:  and then I rested and drifted.  Can you not feel for me, that to mention it is like a scorching furnace?  Willoughby has entangled papa.  He schemes incessantly to keep me entangled.  I fly from his cunning as much as from anything.  I dread it.  I have told you that I am more to blame than he, but I must accuse him.  And wedding-presents! and congratulations!  And to be his guest!”

“All that makes up a plea in mitigation,” said Vernon.

“Is it not sufficient for you?” she asked him timidly.

“You have a masculine good sense that tells you you won’t be respected if you run.  Three more days there might cover a retreat with your father.”

“He will not listen to me.  He confuses me; Willoughby has bewitched him.”

“Commission me:  I will see that he listens.”

“And go back?  Oh, no!  To London!  Besides, there is the dining with Mrs. Mountstuart this evening; and I like her very well, but I must avoid her.  She has a kind of idolatry . . .  And what answers can I give?  I supplicate her with looks.  She observes them, my efforts to divert them from being painful produce a comic expression to her, and I am a charming ‘rogue’, and I am entertained on the topic she assumes to be principally interesting me.  I must avoid her.  The thought of her leaves me no choice.  She is clever.  She could tattoo me with epigrams.”

“Stay . . . there you can hold your own.”

“She has told me you give me credit for a spice of wit.  I have not discovered my possession.  We have spoken of it; we call it your delusion.  She grants me some beauty; that must be hers.”

“There’s no delusion in one case or the other, Miss Middleton.  You have beauty and wit; public opinion will say, wildness:  indifference to your reputation will be charged on you, and your friends will have to admit it.  But you will be out of this difficulty.”

“Ah—­to weave a second?”

“Impossible to judge until we see how you escape the first.  And I have no more to say.  I love your father.  His humour of sententiousness and doctorial stilts is a mask he delights in, but you ought to know him and not be frightened by it.  If you sat with him an hour at a Latin task, and if you took his hand and told him you could not leave him, and no tears!—­he would answer you at once.  It would involve a day or two further; disagreeable to you, no doubt:  preferable to the present mode of escape, as I think.  But I have no power whatever to persuade.  I have not the ‘lady’s tongue’.  My appeal is always to reason.”

“It is a compliment.  I loathe the ’lady’s tongue’.”

“It’s a distinctly good gift, and I wish I had it.  I might have succeeded instead of failing, and appearing to pay a compliment.”

“Surely the express train is very late, Mr. Whitford?”