“I verily believe we are directing the girl to dissect a caprice.  Such things are seen large by these young people, but as they have neither organs, nor arteries, nor brains, nor membranes, dissection and inspection will be alike profitlessly practised.  Your inquiry is natural for a lover, whose passion to enter into relations with the sex is ordinarily in proportion to his ignorance of the stuff composing them.  At a particular age they traffic in whims:  which are, I presume, the spiritual of hysterics; and are indubitably preferable, so long as they are not pushed too far.  Examples are not wanting to prove that a flighty initiative on the part of the male is a handsome corrective.  In that case, we should probably have had the roof off the house, and the girl now at your feet.  Ha!”

“Despise me, father.  I am punished for ever thinking myself the superior of any woman,” said Clara.

“Your hand out to him, my dear, since he is for a formal reconciliation; and I can’t wonder.”

“Father!  I have said I do not . . .  I have said I cannot . . .”

“By the most merciful! what? what? the name for it, words for it!”

“Do not frown on me, father.  I wish him happiness.  I cannot marry him.  I do not love him.”

“You will remember that you informed me aforetime that you did love him.”

“I was ignorant . . .  I did not know myself.  I wish him to be happy.”

“You deny him the happiness you wish him!”

“It would not be for his happiness were I to wed him.”

“Oh!” burst from Willoughby.

“You hear him.  He rejects your prediction, Clara Middleton.”  She caught her clasped hands up to her throat.  “Wretched, wretched, both!”

“And you have not a word against him, miserable girl.”

“Miserable!  I am.”

“It is the cry of an animal!”

“Yes, father.”

“You feel like one?  Your behaviour is of that shape.  You have not a word?”

“Against myself, not against him.”

“And I, when you speak so generously, am to yield you? give you up?” cried Willoughby.  “Ah! my love, my Clara, impose what you will on me; not that.  It is too much for man.  It is, I swear it, beyond my strength.”

“Pursue, continue the strain; ’tis in the right key,” said Dr. Middleton, departing.

Willoughby wheeled and waylaid him with a bound.

“Plead for me, sir; you are all-powerful.  Let her be mine, she shall be happy, or I will perish for it.  I will call it on my head.—­Impossible!  I cannot lose her.  Lose you, my love? it would be to strip myself of every blessing of body and soul.  It would be to deny myself possession of grace, beauty, wit, all the incomparable charms of loveliness of mind and person in woman, and plant myself in a desert.  You are my mate, the sum of everything I call mine.  Clara, I should be less than man to submit to such a loss.  Consent to it?  But I love you!  I worship you!  How can I consent to lose you . . . ?”