"Why, Grace, that is the very thing you complained of in your sinful and ungrateful speech, just now! But do not disturb me with any more temper. I must take the opportunity, before the mail goes out, to tell your poor sick father how you have received his letter." "Oh no, if you please not. You are quite mistaken, if you think that I thought of myself first. My dear father knows that I never would do that; and it would be quite vain to tell him so. Oh, my darling, darling father!--where are you now, and whatever are you doing?" "Grace, you are becoming outrageous quite. You know quite well where your father is; and as to what he is doing, you know from his own letter that he is lying ill, and longing for you to attend upon him. And this is the way that you qualify yourself!" "Somehow or other now--I do not mean to be wicked, aunt--but I don't think my father ever wrote that letter--I mean, at any rate, of his own free will. Somebody must have stood over him--I feel as if I really saw them--and made him say this, and that, and things that he never used to think of saying. Why, he never would have dreamed, when he was well, of telling me I was to marry anybody. He was so jealous of me, he could hardly bear any gentleman to dare to smile; and he used to make me promise to begin to let him know, five years before I thought of any one. And now for him to tell me to marry in a week--just as if he was putting down a silver-side to salt--and to marry a boy that he scarcely ever heard of, and never even introduced to me--he must have been, he cannot but have been, either wonderfully affected by the climate, or shackled down in a slave-driver's dungeon, until he had no idea what he was about." "Have you finished, Grace, now? Is your violence over?" "No; I have no violence; and it is not half over. But still, if you wish to say anything, I will do all I can to listen to it." "You are most obliging. One would really think that I were seventeen, and you nearly seventy." "Aunt Patch, you know that I am as good as nineteen; and instead of being seventy you are scarcely fifty-five." "Grace, your memory is better about ages than about what you do not wish to hear of. And you do not wish to hear, with the common selfishness of the period, of the duty which is the most sacred of all, and at the same time the noblest privilege--the duty of self-sacrifice. What are your own little inclinations, petty conceits, and miserable jokes--jokes that are ever at deadly enmity with all deep religion--ah, what are they--you selfish and frivolous girl!--when set in the balance with a parent's life--and a parent whose life would have been in no danger but for his perfect devotion to you?"