When that sternly magnificent old lady, Mrs.Fletcher,--whose ancestors had been Welsh kings in the time of the Romans,--when she should hear this story, the roof of the old hall would hardly be able to hold her wrath and her dismay! The old kings had died away, but the Fletchers, and the Vaughans,--of whom she had been one,--and the Whartons remained, a peculiar people in an age that was then surrendering itself to quick perdition, and with peculiar duties.

Among these duties, the chiefest of them incumbent on females was that of so restraining their affections that they should never damage the good cause by leaving it.

They might marry within the pale,--or remain single, as might be their lot.

She would not take upon herself to say that Emily Wharton was bound to accept Arthur Fletcher, merely because such a marriage was fitting,--although she did think that there was much perverseness in the girl, who might have taught herself, had she not been stubborn, to comply with the wishes of the families.

But to love one below herself, a man without a father, a foreigner, a black Portuguese nameless Jew, merely because he had a bright eye, and a hook nose, and a glib tongue,--that a girl from the Whartons should do this--! It was so unnatural to Mrs.Fletcher that it would be hardly possible to her to be civil to the girl after she had heard that her mind and taste were so astray.