At first my father seemed unable to believe his own ears.

“Postpone?  Now?  After all this money spent?  And everything signed and sealed and witnessed!”

“Yes, if you please, sir, because. . . .”

I got no farther, for flinging down his razor my father rose in a towering rage.

“Are you mad?  Has somebody been putting the evil eye on you?  The greatest match this island has ever seen, and you say postpone—­put it off, stop it, that’s what you mean.  Do you want to make a fool of a man?  At the last moment, too.  Just when there’s nothing left but to go to the High Bailiff and the Church! . . .  But I see—­I see what it is.  It’s that young Conrad—­he’s been writing to you.”

I tried to say no, but my father bore me down.

“Don’t go to deny it, ma’am.  He has been writing to every one—­the Bishop, Father Dan, myself even.  Denouncing the marriage if you plaze.”

My father, in his great excitement, was breaking with withering scorn into his native speech.

“Aw yes, though, denouncing and damning it, they’re telling me!  Mighty neighbourly of him, I’m sure!  Just a neighbour lad without a penny at his back to take all that throuble!  If I had known he felt like that about it I might have axed his consent!  The imperence, though!  The imperence of sin!  A father has no rights, it seems!  A daughter is a separate being, and all to that!  Well, well!  Amazing thick, isn’t it?”

He was walking up and down the room with his heavy tread, making the floor shake.

“Then that woman in Rome—­I wouldn’t trust but she has been putting notions into your head, too.  All the new-fangled fooleries, I’ll go bail.  Women and men equal, not a ha’p’orth of difference between them!  The blatherskites!”

I was silenced, and I must have covered my face and cried, for after a while my father softened, and touching my shoulder he asked me if a man of sixty-five was not likely to know better than a girl of nineteen what was good for her, and whether I supposed he had not satisfied himself that this marriage was a good thing for me and for him and for everybody.

“Do you think I’m not doing my best for you, gel—­my very best?”

I must have made some kind of assent, for he said: 

“Then don’t moither me any more, and don’t let your Aunt Bridget moither me—­telling me and telling me what I might have done for her own daughter instead.”

At last, with a kind of rough tenderness, he took me by the arm and raised me to my feet.

“There, there, go to bed and get some sleep.  We’ll have to start off for the high Bailiff’s early in the morning.”

My will was broken down.  I could resist no longer.  Without a word more I left him.

Returning to my room I took the letter I had been writing to Father Dan and tore it up piece by piece.  As I did so I felt as if I were tearing up a living thing—­something of myself, my heart and all that was contained in it.