“I have not found time, amid this pressure of business, to write a word to your daughter for some weeks.  Say to her that I ever bear her in respectful remembrance, and shall refer to the days spent at Woodbine Lodge as among the brightest of my life.”

There had been no formal application for the hand of his daughter up to this time; yet had it not crossed the thought of Markland that any other result would follow; for the relation into which Lyon had voluntarily brought himself left no room for honourable retreat.  His letters to Fanny more than bound him to a pledge of his hand.  They were only such as one bearing the tenderest affection might write.

Many weeks had elapsed since Fanny received a letter, and she was beginning to droop under the long suspense.  None came for her now, and here was the cold, brief reference to one whose heart was throbbing toward him, full of love.

Markland was stung by this evasive reference to his daughter, for its meaning he clearly understood.  Not that he had set his heart on an alliance of Fanny with this man, but, having come to look upon such an event as almost certain, and regarding all obstacles in the way as lying on his side of the question, pride was severely shocked by so unexpected a show of indifference.  And its exhibition was the more annoying, manifested, as it was, just at the moment when he had become most painfully aware that all his worldly possessions were beyond his control, and might pass from his reach forever.

“Can there be such baseness in the man?” he exclaimed, mentally, with bitterness, as the thought flitted through his mind that Lyon had deliberately inveigled him, and, having been an instrument of his ruin, now turned from him with cold indifference.

“Impossible!” he replied, aloud, to the frightful conjecture.  “I will not cherish the thought for a single moment.”

But a suggestion like this, once made to a man in his circumstances, is not to be cast out of the mind by a simple act of rejection.  It becomes a living thing, and manifests its perpetual presence.  Turn his thought from it as he would, back to that point it came, and the oftener this occurred, the more corroborating suggestions arrayed themselves by its side.

Mr. Markland was alone in the library, with Mr. Lyon’s hastily read letters before him, and yet pondering, with an unquiet spirit, the varied relations in which he had become placed, when the door was quietly pushed open, and he heard light footsteps crossing the room.  Turning, he met the anxious face of his daughter, who, no longer able to bear the suspense that was torturing her, had overcome all shrinking maiden delicacy, and now came to ask if, enclosed in either of his letters, was one for her.  She advanced close to where he was sitting, and, as he looked at her with a close observation, he saw that her countenance was almost colourless, her lips rigid, and her heart beating with an oppressed motion, as if half the blood in her body had flowed back upon it.