'I will take her off a cliff to start with, commander, and anchor her close to the sights which are worth seeing.'
'What are your means? Can you support my daughter without obliging me to put my hand in my pocket?'
'I shall not call upon you for a bad sixpence,' answered Captain Jackman, with a lofty toss of his head.
The commander stared hard at him, and breathed short, then burst forth—
'But how do I know who you are? You get locked up in a cave with my daughter, fall in love with her inside of a fortnight, and propose for her hand. I am thunderstruck. Marriage is a slow and solemn thing—a contract that is not to be thundered through as though a hurricane of need blew astern of it. You have told us your parents are dead, and I have no doubt, sir, from the sample they have left in their offspring, that they were in the highest degree respectable; but they were strangers. I never contemplated a marriage of this sort. You may have relations my daughter may find extremely degrading to her.'
'You should not talk thus without knowing,' said Captain Jackman, starting on his chair, and looking very fiery and disdainful. 'It is not customary, I think, to sweep the circle of the relations of a lady whose hand we propose for, otherwise——' He coughed.
'What does that cough signify, sir?'
'Mr. Fortt!'
The commander coloured, and looked viciously at the captain, but made no reply; in fact, he had no reply to make; for Captain Jackman, in probing and prowling about and asking questions, had got to hear that Fortt, who was a retired dairyman and a good-looking man with strong whiskers, had married Conway's sister, and was living with her in a handsome villa. The commander was not, by this marriage, to be driven from his guns. He stuck to his home, but he never approached the Fortts' house, nor had a word or a look for his sister and her man if he met them. On the other hand, Miss Conway regularly visited her uncle and aunt, and occasionally made excursions with them to a considerable distance, such as Canterbury and London.
At this instant she entered. She leapt in a graceful bound from the bottom step of the short flight into the room, giving her body as many swings, though always of a stately sort, as you would expect to see in some lively princess on her entrance.