By a man of his address and past experience in all manner of worldly rascality, her timidity, coyness, or scruples must, he thought, be eventually overcome. He had entered stakes on the race; he would not readily drop out of the hunt—the pursuit of a helpless girl; if it did not redound to his credit, it would at least afford him pleasure, and if successful would flatter his vanity, for her beauty was undoubted.
Moreover, he strangely felt somewhat revengeful for the trouble she had already given him, and to this sentiment the downfall of her pride and the destruction, if possible, of her delicacy and purity of nature would be soothing to his spirit.
Even amid his caresses and love-making there was an easy insolence in his manner, born of his innate and perverse vulgarity of race and nature, and encouraged by the girl's unprotected condition, without parents or brothers; but it was so veiled that poor Ellinor never suspected it till he said, with something of irritation in his manner,
'As for the old devil-dodger, we do not require his consent now, I suppose?'
'Who—what?' asked Ellinor, with perplexity.
'Doctor Wodrow—the psalm-singing old beggar.'
'Do not speak of him so irreverently,' said Ellinor, imploringly; 'he made a pet of me from my infancy, and I love him as if he was my father.'
'Oh,' said Sir Redmond, jealously, 'and his son, too, I suppose?'
'How can you speak to me thus?' asked Ellinor, as the agonised face of the young hussar she had seen in the park came upbraidingly before her. How little Sleath knew or appreciated the depth of her pure, innocent, and dreamy nature, albeit that, through fanning her ambition, he had taught her to be false to Robert Wodrow.
After a pause, resuming his softest tone, he said, while holding her hands in his, and looking fondly and admiringly down into her soft hazel eyes,