D’Almayne paused, then a meaning but disagreeable smile passed across his handsome features, as he replied,--“If I can induce Mr. Crane to withdraw his suit of his own accord, yet continue his amicable relations towards this family, and be willing to sell the farm to your father at his own price, and by these means lead Mr. Hazlehurst to regard your friend’s offer favourably, shall I be acting in accordance with your wishes.” “Nay, my dear D’Almayne, if you can indeed persuade Mr. Crane to perform so magnanimous a part, I shall consider you the best and cleverest fellow in the world. As to my wishing you to do so, I should as soon have thought of wishing you to appoint me First Lord of the Treasury--one only wishes for such things as one, in some degree, expects to obtain. But surely you over-calculate your powers of persuasion,” returned Hazlehurst, scarcely knowing whether D’Almayne might not be amusing himself at his expense. “I will remain here and await the result of your interview with your father, and if it terminate as I predict, I will attempt my little bit of diplomacy;--the result will prove to you whether or not I overrate my Machiavelian talents,” was the confident reply--and so they parted. Mr. Hazlehurst, senior, was by no means in an amiable frame of mind when his son entered the library--the gout, considerably increased by the wine-bibbing of the previous evening, pervaded his entire system, mental and bodily; and through the atrabilious medium of a disordered stomach, he looked back upon his disagreement with Coverdale, till it became magnified into a serious quarrel. Mr. Crane had just informed him that, on renewing his offer to Alice on the previous evening, the young lady muttered a few words, incoherent indeed, but, as he conceived, of a negative tendency, and instantly conveyed herself away without affording him an opportunity of obtaining an explanation. Whereupon Mr. Hazlehurst, waxing wroth, declared she should accept him that very morning; begged him to retire until he should have seen his daughter, and, as he was pleased to term it, brought her to her senses; and having just dispatched a summons to the poor girl, was waiting her arrival to perpetrate an act of parental tyranny, when his son entered. The consequences may readily be imagined:--Coverdale was angrily and unceremoniously refused; Alice anathematized, excommunicated, and ordered magisterially to be imprisoned in her own room till farther notice, and Arthur severely reprimanded for having introduced Coverdale to the family (which, be it remembered, he had done at his father’s particular request), and cautioned against venturing to countenance Alice in her disobedience, or ever again to refer to the subject in his (Mr. Hazlehurst’s) sovereign presence, on pain of being cut off with the trilling patrimony of one shilling sterling. Arthur attempted a mild remonstrance, whereby he obtained a particular request instantly to