Lady Jane rose from her chair. She coloured high, then became white as a ghost. Astonishment, consternation, pain--pain indescribable, a kind of horror and dismay were in her eyes. She opened her lips, but only to give forth a gasp of sound which was inarticulate. She did not take her eyes from him; but gradually there grew in them, besides the pitiful suffering of a creature outraged and insulted, a gleam of indignation, a flash of contempt. When a man, even a duke, has taken that fatal step between resentment and fury, between what is permissible and what is unpermissible, the other steps are easy enough. Her father forgot that she was Lady Jane, and the first of womankind. He let his passion go. The more he had loved and elevated her, the more did he trample all her superiority under his feet. “Ah! you thought I should say something prettier, something more pleasant,” he cried. “Poetical! but I am not poetical, and that is the short and long of it. Afraid to lose your chance altogether, and determined to have a husband, that is the meaning of it! I know now why the man was brought here. I never could make out what we wanted with him at Billings. A last chance for Jane! Ah, I see it all now!” Lady Jane stood and received all this as if the words had been stones. She put her hands upon her breast to ward them off. She shrank backwards now and then with a faint moan, as one after another was discharged at her. Her eyes grew larger, and more and more pitiful, wet, appealing as if to earth and heaven; but she never withdrew them from her father’s face. And now that he had let himself loose, he raved on, expending upon her all his wrath, putting himself more and more fatally in the wrong with every word, showing, alas! that nothing, not a coal-heaver, could be more vulgar than a duke when he is put to it. Lady Jane stood still before him and never said a word. This was worse than the guillotine. She had dreamt of facing the insults of the mob, but never the insults of her father. As she stood there, to all appearance so full and painfully occupied in sustaining the storm of words thus poured upon her, a hundred reflections were passing through her mind. She almost smiled to herself to think how small had been the terrible scenes presented to her by her imagination, in face of the reality. The Constitution might have gone to pieces, the guillotine might have been raised without shaking her confidence in her class, or disturbing her lofty unconscious superiority to all the rabble could do,--but her father--this was what she had not thought of. Ah! it is not any rabble that can shake the foundations of the earth: but when your father, when those who are most dear to you, lay hands upon the pillars of the house--she stood so still, and looked at him with such a steadfast gaze, that the Duke was driven out of himself. He said--who can doubt?--a thousand things he never meant to say. He turned himself outside in