If your mother was unhappy, the fault lay in her own weak and morbid temper.

As for me, I now tell you, once for all, that your destiny is either beggary or a coronet; on that I am resolved!" She stood before him like one who had drawn strength from the full knowledge of her fate.

Her face, it is true, had become pale, but it was the paleness of a calm but lofty spirit, and she replied, with a full and clear voice: "I said, sir--for I had her own sacred assurance for it--that my mother, when she married you, had no previous engagement; it is not so with your daughter--my affections are fixed upon another." There are some natures so essentially tyrannical, and to whom resistance is a matter of such extraordinary novelty, that its manifestation absolutely surprises them out of their natural character.

In this manner Sir Thomas Gourlay was affected.

Instead of flying into a fresh hurricane of rage, he felt so completely astounded, that he was only capable of turning round to her, and asking, in a voice unusually calm: "Pray name him, Miss Gourlay." "In that, sir, you will excuse me--for the present.