"If I had chosen some worthless wench without a penny to bless herself withal, you would have shaken the head and broken the staff over me. Now that I have chosen one who is in all ways unexceptional, who is a wealthy heiress of irreproachable manners of life, the favourite of everybody, a dutiful daughter, it is all the same—you disapprove. Is there aught I could do—any change that I could make—that would give thee pleasure?"
"None—till I saw there was an amendment in thyself."
"If I can give satisfaction in no way to thee, father, I may assuredly make choice for myself. Bess may not be beautiful, but she pleases me—she has what is better than beauty, all Hall estate on her back. It will be to your advantage and to that of Jule that I should take her—you will thus be rid of me, who content neither of you, simply because my tongue has a point to it, and I do not suffer it to lie by and be blunted."
Then Julian laughed out.
"What avails all this reckoning and debating over a matter that cannot be settled till the main person concerned has been consulted? Bessie, I am very sure, has not the faintest waft of a notion that such schemes are being spun about her, or had not till I spoke with her yestreen. She will never take thee, Fox. Bessie has a good heart and a shrewd understanding, and neither will suffer her to take thee."
"You think not?" asked Fox, superciliously.
"I am sure she will not," answered Julian.
"We shall see," said Fox. "She is not as was her brother, one to fly in the face of a father. He has set his mind to it, and if Julian will not have him, then he will yet have an Anthony Cleverdon to sit on his seat, and reign in his stead, when he has been gathered to his old yeoman fathers."
"How mean you?"