"Encouraged—how dare you say so?"
"Dare—there is no daring in it, my dear. Who commands here—you or I?"
"Sir, you presume upon your relationship in some way with mamma, to talk to me thus, surely."
"I presume only on my own love for you, and would keep you, a daughter of Canada, as I would a daughter of America, from the contamination of that 'tarnal red-coated British slave!"
Still, as yet, save when dragging her to the house—her own father's house—he had not laid hands on her. With all his roughness and innate brutality, he felt that there was an undefinable something in the grand hauteur, the excessive delicacy, the tone of refinement, in the general aspect and bearing of Aurelia, that quelled, while it secretly "riled" him.
He noticed the very expression of her nostrils, the quiver of her proud lip and the flash of her dark blue eye—the flash of scorn and loathing when she replied to him, and he quailed under it—he, the utter American rowdy! But this emotion began to die as he drained another bumper of stiff brandy and water, and he took to blustering and swearing again.
"Do not use language such as this—and to me," said Aurelia, putting her trembling hands to her ears; "surely you do not know the nature of oaths."
"Don't I? I calculate I've sworn enough to sink a seventy-four-gun ship," said he, with a mocking laugh; "but surely," he added, drawing nearer her, and adopting a coaxing tone and bearing, "in time you'll forget all about that fellow, and see the necessity of quietly becoming Mrs. Ithuriel Smash, when you cannot make a better of it."
The girl's heart seemed to give a great bound, and then to die within her, at these words, the look that accompanied and the dreadful inference to be deduced from them.
"Anyhow, I calculate that I shan't forget the evening I saw you and that yaw-haw beast of a Britisher giving each other such nice tokens of your mutual good-will—he giving you what he calls his heart—and you making a free gift of the whole seigneury of St. Eustache! If once he comes within the reach of my rifle...!"