"So soon as you are safely wedded and in a home of your own, sweet one," she said to Primrose, "your relations with your father can become both easy and pleasant. He purposes in the future to dwell more than heretofore at Bryn Afon, and you will have frequent opportunities of pleasing him with your society, and gratifying your own filial affection, while at the same time such intercourse can be fully controlled at the discretion of your beloved husband and our faithful Rhiwallon. Your father will rejoice with all a fond parent's love and pride in the possession of so fair a daughter and in the knowledge of her happy settlement in life, and you will likewise give to him a love and reverence which--alas, that a mother should need utter such words to her child--you could scarce find so easy were you dwelling beneath his own roof, ever in his company. Seek not, sweet one, I pray you, to break this barrier, which a sad fate has set up betwixt yourself and him. Such dealings with you both seem hard and unnatural for a wife and mother to speak of thus coldly, but are more necessary than you can deem possible. Bid her, Percival, believe that her union with yourself will assuredly further her father's true happiness far more than any immediate knowledge of her relationship to himself could do, and she will rest content." "Is it indeed so, Percival?" asked Primrose entreatingly. "May I truly, as a daughter who would fain render all loving and dutiful reverence to a father, thus contemplate my future happiness without sin, and, unknown to him, and with my dear mother's consent only, come to the very eve of my marriage, ere my existence may be revealed to him? Sweet mother, you bid me appeal to him whom above all the world I love and honour, and by his opinion I will be guided, nor fear any thought of ill, an his true heart can safely bid me trust in the hope you bid me cherish of my father's future consent to our union; for fain would I have his blessing ere I enter upon that new life, the thought of which at times o'erwhelms me in its promise of bliss!" And hiding her face on her lover's shoulder, Primrose clung to him, trembling.