He went away, sunk into the depths of an abyss of disappointment. And then it was that Aunt Emily threw up her hands in amazement. She wished to know whom the girl expected to marry--she, the daughter of a farmer--a wealthy and well-to-do farmer, to be sure, but still nothing more than a farmer. Did she look for a peer of the realm--a duke--or maybe a baronet or a prince? And Mr. Blaydon had eight hundred a year and a good situation. Moreover he had been told that her father was a farmer, and yet he had behaved as a gentleman! What, in the face of all this impetuosity, was Priscilla’s plaint that she had no affection for the man--that she felt she could not be happy with him--that she was not the sort of wife that such a man wanted? Aunt Emily ridiculed her protests. They were artificial, she affirmed. They were the result of reading foolish novels in foreign languages; and in a year or two she would find out the mistake she was making--yes, when it would be too late--too late! Priscilla fled to her home, but only to find that the story of her folly, of her flying in the face of Providence--the phrase was Aunt Emily’s--had got there before her. Within a week she had written accepting Mr. Blaydon. Her mother--her dying mother--backed up by her father, had brought this about. She had implored Priscilla to accept the man. “My last words to you, my child--think of that,” she had said. “The last request of a dying mother anxious for her child’s happiness. I tell you, Priscilla, that I shall die happy if I can see you safely married to a man who will take you away from this neighbourhood. If you refuse, what will be your reflections so long as you live? You will have it on your soul that you refused to listen to the last prayer of your dying mother.” The girl made a rush for the writing-table with her heart full of anger and her eyes full of tears. But she wrote the letter, and the ardent and eligible Mr. Blaydon came down to Framsby, and they were married one February morning in Athalsdean Church, and he was arrested on a charge of embezzlement when they were in the act of leaving the sacred building. The police officers had arrived ten minutes too late. It was the sentiment of the young and innocent wife, dwelt on so pathetically by his counsel--“Was it right that she, that guileless girl, should be made to suffer for a crime of which she was as innocent as an infant unborn?” he enquired--it was this sentiment that caused the jury to recommend him to mercy and the judge to sentence him to one year’s imprisonment only, from the date of his committal. He went to prison, and Priscilla went home, and continued to call herself by her maiden name--was she not as a maiden entitled to it? she asked. Six weeks later her mother died; and now... CHAPTER VII