"Then, that you will not give me up?"
"Mamma!" said Margaret, entreatingly. "You hear what Wyvis says. It is not his fault. Why—why—won't you let us be happy?"
"Don't appeal to your mother," said Wyvis, the workings of whose features showed that he was becoming frightfully agitated. "You know that she is against me. Listen to your own heart—what does it say? It speaks to you of my love for you, of your own love for me. Darling, you know how miserable my life has been. Are you going to scatter all my hopes again and plunge me down in the depths of gloom? And all for what? To satisfy a worldly scruple. It is not even as if I had been brought up in my early years in the station to which my father belonged. I have never known him—never known any relations but the Brands; and they are not so very much beneath you. Don't fail me, Margaret! I shall lose all faith in goodness if I lose faith in you!"
"I think," said Lady Caroline, in the rather disheartening pause which followed upon Wyvis' words—disheartening to him, at least, and also to Janetta, who had counted much upon Margaret's innate nobility of soul!—"I think that I may now be permitted to say a word to my daughter before she replies. What Mr. Wyvis Brand asks you to do, Margaret, is to marry him at once. Well, the time for coercion has gone by. Of course, we cannot prevent you from marrying him if you choose to do so, but on the other hand we shall never speak to you again."
Wyvis uttered a short laugh, as if he were scornfully ready to meet that contingency, but Margaret's look of startled horror recalled him to decorum.
"You would be no longer any child of ours," said Lady Caroline, calmly. "Your father concurs with me in this. You have known our views so long and so well that we feel it almost necessary to explain this to you. Mr. Brand wishes you to choose, as a matter of fact, between his house and ours. Make your choice—make it now, if you like; but understand—and I am very sorry to be obliged to say a thing which may perhaps hurt the feelings of some persons present—that if you marry the son of a ploughman and a scullery-maid—I do not mean to be more offensive than I can help—you cannot possibly expect to be received at Helmsley Court."
"But, mamma! he ranks as one of the Brands of the Red House. Nobody knows."
"But everybody will know," said Lady Caroline, calmly. "I shall take care of that. I don't know how it is that Mr. Brand has got possession of the family estate—to which he has, of course, no right; but it has an ugly look of fraud about it, to which public attention had better be drawn at once. Mr. Brand may have been a party to the deception all along, for aught I know."
"That statement needs no refutation," said Wyvis, calmly, though with a dangerous glitter in his eyes. "I shall prove my integrity by handing over the Red House to my bro——to Cuthbert Brand, who is of course the rightful owner of the place."
"You hear. Margaret?" said Lady Caroline. "You will not even have the Red House in your portion. You have to choose between your mother and father and friends, position, wealth, refinement, luxury—and Wyvis Brand. That is your alternative. He will have no position of his own, no house to offer you; I am amazed at his selfishness, I must own, at making such a proposition."