The colour rushed to Anne’s face, and anger to her heart: but as the one was invisible, so she restrained the other. She put restraint in every way on herself. ‘That may be so, that may be so! you cannot tell unless you know everything,’ she said. Then, after a pause, ‘But whether it was right or wrong, it is done now, and I cannot alter it. It is not a matter upon which another can decide for you. Obedience at my age cannot be absolute. When you have to make the one choice of your life, can your father do it, or anyone but yourself? Did you think so when you were like me?’ she said, with an appeal full of earnestness which was almost impassioned. This appeal took Heathcote entirely by surprise, and changed all the current of his thoughts. ‘I was never like you,’ he said, hastily--‘like you! I never could compare myself--I never could pretend--I thought I loved half-a-dozen women. Did I ever make the one choice of my life? No, no! A wandering man afloat upon the world can never be like--such as you: there is too great a difference. We cannot compare things so unlike----’ ‘But I thought’--she said, then stopped: for his story which she had heard bore a very different meaning. And what right had she to advert to it? ‘I don’t know if you speak in--in respect--or in contempt?’ ‘In contempt--could that be? Here is the state of the case as concerns yourself--leaving the general question. My offer to break the entail has no attractions for your father, because he thinks he cannot secure Mount to you. It is doing something against his own heart, against all he wishes, to punish you. Don’t you know, Miss Mountford--but most likely you never felt it--that to be wroth with those we love Doth work like madness in the brain?’ ‘Love?--that would be great love, passionate love--we have not anything of the kind in our house,’ said Anne, in a low tone of emotion. ‘If there was that, do you think I would go against it, even for----’ Here she stopped with a thrill in her voice. ‘I think you must be mistaken a little, Mr. Heathcote. But I do not see how I can change. Papa asked of me--not the lesser things in which I could have obeyed him, but the one great thing in which I could not. Were I to take your advice, I do not know what I could do.’ Then they walked in silence round the side of the house, under the long line of the drawing-room windows, from which indeed the interview had been watched with much astonishment. Rose had never doubted that the heir of the house was on her side. It seemed no better than a desertion that he should walk and talk with Anne in this way. It filled her with amazement. And in such a cold night too! ‘Hush, child!’ her mother was saying; ‘he has been with papa to Hunston, he has heard all the business arrangements talked over. No doubt he is having a little conversation with Anne, for her good.’