"You have spoiled all with your precipitation," said the uncle. "Precipitation! d---n it, what would you have? I have been fifty years making up my mind to marry; and now when I have not a day to lose, you talk of precipitation!" answered the lover, throwing himself into an easy-chair. "But you have not been fifty years making up your mind to marry my niece," said Brandon, dryly. "To be refused, positively refused, by a country girl!" continued Mauleverer, soliloquizing aloud; "and that too at my age and with all my experience!--a country girl without rank, _ton_, accomplishments! By heavens! I don't care if all the world heard it,--for not a soul in the world will ever believe it." Brandon sat speechless, eying the mortified face of the courtier with a malicious complacency, and there was a pause of several minutes. Sir William then, mastering the strange feeling which made him always rejoice in whatever threw ridicule on his friend, approached, laid his hand kindly on Mauleverer's shoulder, and talked to him of comfort and of encouragement. The reader will believe that Mauleverer was not a man whom it was impossible to encourage. CHAPTER XXX. Before he came, everything loved me, and I had more things to love than I could reckon by the hairs of my head. Now I feel I can love but one, and that one has deserted me. . . . Well, be it so,-- let her perish, let her be anything but mine!--Melmoth. Early the next morning Sir William Brandon was closeted for a long time with his niece, previous to his departure to the duties of his office. Anxious and alarmed for the success of one of the darling projects of his ambition, he spared no art in his conversation with Lucy, that his great ingenuity of eloquence and wonderful insight into human nature could suggest, in order to gain at least a foundation for the raising of his scheme. Among other resources of his worldly tact, he hinted at Lucy's love for Clifford; and (though darkly and subtly, as befitting the purity of the one he addressed) this abandoned and wily person did not scruple to hint also at the possibility of indulging that love _after_ marriage; though he denounced, as the last of indecorums, the crime of encouraging it _before_. This hint, however, fell harmless upon the innocent ear of Lucy. She did not in the remotest degree comprehend its meaning; she only, with a glowing cheek and a pouting lip, resented the allusion to a love which she thought it insolent in any one even to suspect.