I was getting impatient at last. I thought that the explanation explained little, and was really about to say so; but he anticipated me by saying, "Believe me, my dear sir, any suffering, any unhappiness that my error has occasioned, has fallen entirely upon me. _You_ at least have nothing to complain of. The letter which ought to have reached you contained a proposal from me for the hand of your younger daughter; a proposal which I now make to you, happily, in a way that cannot be frustrated by an accident." He went on to press his suit, Tom, eagerly and warmly; but still with that scrupulous regard to truthfulness I have ever remarked in him. He acknowledged the difference in age, the difference in character, the disparity between Cary's joyous, sunny nature and his own colder mood; but he hoped for happiness, on grounds so solid and so reasonable that showed me much of his own thoughtful habit of mind. Of his fortune, he simply said that it was very far above all his requirements; that he himself had few, if any, expensive tastes, but was amply able to indulge such in a wife, if she were disposed to cultivate them. He added that he knew my daughter had always been accustomed to habits of luxury and expense, always lived in a style that included every possible gratification, and therefore, if not in possession of ample means, he never would have presumed on his present offer. I felt for a moment the vulgar pleasure that such flattery confers. I own to you, Tom, I experienced a degree of satisfaction at thinking that even to the observant eyes of Morris himself,--old soldier as he was,--the Dodds had passed for brilliant and fashionable folk, in the fullest enjoyment of every gift of fortune; but as quickly a more honest and more manly impulse overcame this thought, and in a few words I told him that he was totally mistaken; that I was a poor, half-ruined Irish gentleman, with an indolent tenantry and an encumbered estate; that our means afforded no possible pretension to the style in which we lived, nor the society we mixed in; that it would require years of patient economy and privation to repay the extravagance into which our foreign tour had launched us; and that, so convinced was I of the inevitable ruin a continuance of such a life must incur, I had firmly resolved to go back to Ireland at the end of the present month and never leave it again for the rest of my days. I suppose I spoke warmly, for I felt deeply. The shame many of the avowals might have cost me in calmer mood was forgotten now, in my ardent determination to be honest and above-board. I was resolved, too, to make amends to my own heart for all the petty deceptions I had descended to in a former case, and, even at the cost of the loss of a son-in-law, to secure a little sense of self-esteem. He would not let me finish, Tom, but, grasping my hand in his with a grip I did n't believe he was capable of, he said,--