He would find some way of making himself disagreeable.  If it were only by speaking his mind, he thought that he could speak it in such a way that the Basle merchant would not like it.  He would tell Urmand in the first place that Marie was won not at all by affection, not in the least by any personal regard for her suitor, but altogether by a feeling of duty towards her uncle.  And he would point out to this suitor how dastardly a thing it would be to take advantage of a girl so placed.  He planned a speech or two as he drove along which he thought that even Urmand, thick-skinned as he believed him to be, would dislike to hear.  ‘You may have her, perhaps,’ he would say to him, ’as so much goods that you would buy, because she is, as a thing in her uncle’s hands, to be bought.  She believes it to be her duty, as being altogether dependent, to be disposed of as her uncle may choose.  And she will go to you, as she would to any other man who might make the purchase.  But as for loving you, you don’t even believe that she loves you.  She will keep your house for you; but she will never love you.  She will keep your house for you,—­unless, indeed, she should find you to be so intolerable to her, that she should be forced to leave you.  It is in that way that you will have her,—­if you are so low a thing as to be willing to take her so.’  He planned various speeches of such a nature—­not intending to trust entirely to speeches, but to proceed to some attempt at choking afterwards if it should be necessary.  Marie Bromar should not become Adrian Urmand’s wife without some effort on his part.  So resolving, he drove into the yard of the hotel at Colmar.

As soon as he entered the house Madame Faragon began to ask him questions about the wedding.  When was it to be?  George thought for a moment, and then remembered that he had not even heard the day named.

‘Why don’t you answer me, George?’ said the old woman angrily.  ’You must know when it’s going to be.’

‘I don’t know that it’s going to be at all,’ said George.

’Not going to be at all!  Why not?  There is not anything wrong, is there?  Were they not betrothed?  Why don’t you tell me, George?’

‘Yes; they were betrothed.’

’And is he crying off?  I should have thought Michel Voss was the man to strangle him if he did that.’

‘And I am the man to strangle him if he don’t,’ said George, walking out of the room.

He knew that he had been silly and absurd, but he knew also that he was so moved as to have hardly any control over himself.  In the few words that he had now said to Madame Faragon he had, as he felt, told the story of his own disappointment; and yet he had not in the least intended to take the old woman into his confidence.  He had not meant to have said a word about the quarrel between himself and his father, and now he had told everything.

When she saw him again in the evening, of course she asked him some farther questions.