"Hold your tongue," interrupted the Squire; "I want to talk to you. Your grandmother was a Hazeldean."
"Her picture is in the drawing-room at Rood. People think me very like her!"
"Indeed!" said the Squire. "The Hazeldeans are generally inclined to be stout and rosy, which you are certainly not. But no fault of yours. We are all as Heaven made us! However, to the point. I am going to alter my will—(said with a choking gulp.) This is the rough draft for the lawyers to work upon."
"Pray—pray, sir, do not speak to me on such a subject. I can not bear to contemplate even the possibility of—of—"
"My death! Ha, ha! Nonsense. My own son calculated on the date of it by the insurance tables. Ha, ha, ha. A very fashionable son—Eh! Ha, ha!"
"Poor Frank, do not let him suffer for a momentary forgetfulness of right feeling. When he comes to be married to that foreign lady, and be a father himself, he—"
"Father himself!" burst forth the Squire. "Father to a swarm of sallow-faced Popish tadpoles! No foreign frogs shall hop about my grave in Hazeldean church-yard. No, no. But you need not look so reproachful—I am not going to disinherit Frank."
"Of course not," said Randal, with a bitter curve in the lip that rebelled against the joyous smile which he sought to impose on it.
"No—I shall leave him the life-interest in the greater part of the property; but if he marry a foreigner, her children will not succeed—you will stand after him in that case. But—(now, don't interrupt me)—but Frank looks as if he would live longer than you—so small thanks to me for my good intentions, you may say. I mean to do more for you than a mere barren place in the entail. What do you say to marrying?"
"Just as you please," said Randal, meekly.