In the meantime, it is his desire that nothing shall be said about our engagement until the House rises.  It is reasonable enough.  Papa is sure to be violent,—­lately, the barest allusion to Paul’s name has been enough to make him explode.  When the discovery does come, he will be unmanageable,—­I foresee it clearly.  From little incidents which have happened recently I predict the worst.  He will be capable of making a scene within the precincts of the House.  And, as Paul says, there is some truth in the saying that the last straw breaks the camel’s back.  He will be better able to face papa’s wild wrath when the House has risen.

So the news is to bide a wee.  Of course Paul is right.  And what he wishes I wish too.  Still, it is not all such plain sailing for me as he perhaps thinks.  The domestic atmosphere is almost as electrical as that in the House.  Papa is like the terrier who scents a rat,—­he is always sniffing the air.  He has not actually forbidden me to speak to Paul,—­his courage is not quite at the sticking point; but he is constantly making uncomfortable allusions to persons who number among their acquaintance ‘political adventurers,’ ‘grasping carpet-baggers,’ ’Radical riff-raff,’ and that kind of thing.  Sometimes I venture to call my soul my own; but such a tempest invariably follows that I become discreet again as soon as I possibly can.  So, as a rule, I suffer in silence.

Still, I would with all my heart that the concealment were at an end.  No one need imagine that I am ashamed of being about to marry Paul,—­papa least of all.  On the contrary, I am as proud of it as a woman can be.  Sometimes, when he has said or done something unusually wonderful, I fear that my pride will out,—­I do feel it so strong within me.  I should be delighted to have a trial of strength with papa; anywhere, at any time,—­I should not be so rude to him as he would be to me.  At the bottom of his heart papa knows that I am the more sensible of the two; after a pitched battle or so he would understand it better still.  I know papa!  I have not been his daughter for all these years in vain.  I feel like hot-blooded soldiers must feel, who, burning to attack the enemy in the open field, are ordered to skulk behind hedges, and be shot at.

One result is that Sydney has actually made a proposal of marriage,—­he of all people!  It is too comical.  The best of it was that he took himself quite seriously.  I do not know how many times he has confided to me the sufferings which he has endured for love of other women—­some of them, I am sorry to say, decent married women too; but this is the first occasion on which the theme has been a personal one.  He was so frantic, as he is wont to be, that, to calm him, I told him about Paul,—­which, under the circumstances, to him I felt myself at liberty to do.  In return, he was melodramatic; hinting darkly at I know not what, I was almost cross with him.