"But it is impossible for a young woman with a respect for herself such as I have to submit herself to a man that she loathes. Do as your conscience bids you with the old house. Shall I be less tender to you while you live because I shall have to leave the place when you are dead? Shall I accuse you of injustice or unkindness in my heart? Never! All that is only an outside circumstance to me, comparatively of little moment. But to be the wife of a man I despise!" Then she got up and left the room. A month passed by before the old man returned to the subject, which he did seated in the same room, at the same hour of the day,--at about four o'clock, when the dinner things had been removed. "Isabel," he said, "I cannot help myself." "As to what, Uncle Indefer?" She knew very well what was the matter in which, as he said, he could not help himself. Had there been anything in which his age had wanted assistance from her youth there would have been no hesitation between them; no daughter was ever more tender; no father was ever more trusting. But on this subject it was necessary that he should speak more plainly before she could reply to him. "As to your cousin and the property." "Then in God's name do not trouble yourself further in looking for help where there is none to be had. You mean that the estate ought to go to a man and not to a woman?" "It ought to go to a Jones." "I am not a Jones, nor likely to become a Jones." "You are as near to me as he is,--and so much dearer!" "But not on that account a Jones. My name is Isabel Brodrick. A woman not born to be a Jones may have the luck to become one by marriage, but that will never be the case with me." "You should not laugh at that which is to me a duty." "Dear, dear uncle!" she said, caressing him, "if I seemed to laugh"--and she certainly had laughed when she spoke of the luck of becoming a Jones--"it is only that you may feel how little importance I attach to it all on my own account." "But it is important,--terribly important!" "Very well. Then go to work with two things in your mind fixed as fate. One is that you must leave Llanfeare to your nephew Henry Jones, and the other that I will not marry your nephew Henry Jones. When it is all settled it will be just as though the old place were entailed, as it used to be." "I wish it were." "So do I, if it would save you trouble." "But it isn't the same;--it can't be the same. In getting back the land your grandfather sold I have spent the money I had saved for you." "It shall be all the same to me, and I will take pleasure in thinking that the old family place shall remain as you would have it. I can be proud of the family though I can never bear the name." "You do not care a straw for the family."