“Ha!” thought the baronet, “I have brought her down a step already.”

“Now, Lucy,” said he, “it is time that this undutiful obstinacy on your part should cease.  It is time you should look to and respect—­yes, and obey your father’s wishes.  I have already told you that I have impressed Lord Cullamore with a belief that you are a free and consenting party to this marriage, and I trust you have too much delicacy and self-respect to make your father a liar, for that is the word.  I admit I told him a falsehood, but I did so for the honor and exaltation of my child.  You will not betray me, Lucy?”

“Father,” said she, “I regret that you make these torturing communications to me.  God knows I wish to love and respect you, but when, under solemn circumstances, you utter, by your own admission, a deliberate falsehood to a man of the purest truth and honor; when you knowingly and wilfully mislead him for selfish and ambitious purposes;—­nay, I will retract these words, and suppose it is from an anxiety to secure me rank and happiness,—­I say, father, when you thus forget all that constitutes the integrity and dignity of man, and stoop to the discreditable meanness of falsehood, I ask you, is it manly, or honorable, or affectionate, to involve me in proceedings so utterly shameful, and to ask me to abet you in such a wanton perversion of truth?  Sir, there are fathers—­indeed, I believe, most fathers living—­who would rather see any child of theirs stretched and shrouded up in the grave than know them to be guilty of such a base and deliberate violation of all the sacred principles of truth as this.”

“You will expose me then, and disgrace me forever with this cursed conscientious old blockhead?  I tell you that he doubts my assertion as touching your consent, and is coming to hear the truth from your own lips.  But hearken, girl, betray me to him, and by heavens you know not the extent to which my vengeance will carry me.”

He rose up, and glared at her in a manner that made her apprehensive for her personal safety.

“Father,” said she, growing pale, for the dialogue, brief as it was, had brought the color into her cheeks, “will you permit me to withdraw?  I am quite unequal to these contests of temper and opinion; permit me, sir, to withdraw.  I have already told you, that provided you do not attempt to force me into a marriage contrary to my wishes I shall never marry contrary to yours.”

The baronet swore a deep and blasphemous oath that he would enter into no such stipulation.  The thing, he said, was an evasion, an act of moral fraud and deceit upon her part, and she should not escape from him.

“You wish to gain time, madam, to work out your own treacherous purposes, and to defeat my intentions with respect to you; but it shall not be.  You must see Lord Cullamore; you must corroborate my assertions to him; you must save me from shame and dishonor or dread the consequences.  A paltry sacrifice, indeed, to tell a fib to a doting old peer, who thinks no one in the world honest or honorable but himself!”