Mr Dupuy’s brow clouded over still more evidently. ‘Not to fall in with it!’ he cried excitedly, tossing off the remainder of his Madeira—‘not to fall in with it!—Why, Mr Hawthorn, what do you mean, sir? Of course, if her father bids her, she’ll fall in with it immediately. If she doesn’t—why, then, sir, I’ll just simply have to make her. She shall marry Tom Dupuy the minute I order her to. She should marry a one-eyed man with a wooden leg if her father commanded it. She shall do whatever I tell her. I’ll stand no refusing and shilly-shallying. Let me tell you, sir, if there’s a vice that I hate and detest, it’s the vice of obstinacy. But I’ll stand no obstinacy.’ ‘No obstinacy in those about you,’ Mr Hawthorn put in suggestively. ‘No, sir, no—not in those about me. Other people, of course, I can’t be answerable for, though I’d like to flog every obstinate fellow I come across, just to cure him of his confounded temper. O no, sir; I can’t endure obstinacy—in man or beast, I can’t endure it.’ ‘So it would seem,’ Mr Hawthorn replied drily. ‘I hope sincerely, Miss Dupuy will find the choice you have made for her a suitable and satisfactory one.’ ‘Suitable, sir! Why, of course it’s suitable; and as to satisfactory, well, if I say she’s got to take him, she’ll have to be satisfied with him, willy-nilly.’ ‘But she won’t!’ Tom Dupuy interrupted sullenly, flicking his boot with his short riding-whip in a vicious fashion. ‘She won’t, you may take my word for it, Uncle Theodore. I can’t imagine why it is; but these young women who’ve been educated in England, they’ll never be satisfied with a planter for a husband. They think a gentleman and a son of gentlemen for fifty generations isn’t a good enough match for such fine ladies as themselves; and they go running off after some of these red-coated military fellows down in the garrison over yonder, many of whom, to my certain knowledge, Mr Hawthorn, are nothing more than the sons of tradesmen across there in England. I’ll bet you a sovereign, Uncle Theodore, that Nora’ll refuse to so much as look at the heir of Pimento Valley, the minute she sees him.’ ‘But why do you think so, Mr Tom,’ their host put in, ‘before the young lady has even landed on the island?’