“I will not ask so much as that,” said Lady Jane, tremulous, yet firm; “and yet I have come to ask you for something, father. I am older than girls are usually when they--marry.” “Older, nonsense! Who has told you that?” cried the Duke, his veins beginning to swell, and his heart to thump with rising excitement. “You are in the bloom of your youth. I have never seen a girl look sweeter, or fairer, or younger, for that matter, than my child has been looking. Who has put such folly into your head?” “It is not folly, it is true; and no matter--that is nothing; but only to show you that I am serious. I am no longer a girl, papa. Ah! do not interrupt; I shall always be a girl to you. I am a woman. I have had a great many thoughts before I came to speak--for myself. That is the last thing one wishes to do. To have others do it is so much the easier. But one must at last. I have come to speak to you for myself.” “Jane, you had better pause and think,” said the Duke, with threatening looks. “What can you have to say about yourself? Don’t bring down my respect for my daughter. We are driven out of our respect for women in most cases early in our career; but most men have a prejudice in favour of their daughters. Don’t force me to think that you are just like all the rest.” She looked at him wondering, but with eyes that did not falter. “My mother, I am sure, can have forfeited no one’s respect,” she said softly; “neither shall I, I hope; but perhaps more than she. I must speak to you, father, about my own life. Oh!” she cried, clasping her hands, with a vivid colour coming to her pale cheeks, “speak you for me! do not let me have to do it. There are things that can only be said when the case is desperate, and surely--surely it cannot be desperate between you and me. Speak for me, father, to your own heart.” “So far as I can see, this is melodrama,” said the Duke, with a feeble smile of agitation that looked like a sneer, for his lips were dry. “What am I to say? Come, must we be brutal? That Lady Jane Altamont, like any poor milliner, is beginning to be afraid----” Her eyes opened a little wider with a scared look, but she said nothing, only gazed more fixedly on her father, her whole soul bent on what he was next to say. “Afraid,” he said, with a little forced giggle of a laugh, “because she is twenty-eight, and her cheek is hollow--afraid that she is growing an old maid, and will never get a husband? There is nothing more natural than that,” he cried, bursting out into a mocking laugh.