"If I can give satisfaction in no way to thee, father, I may assuredly make choice for myself. Bess may not be beautiful, but she pleases me--she has what is better than beauty, all Hall estate on her back. It will be to your advantage and to that of Jule that I should take her--you will thus be rid of me, who content neither of you, simply because my tongue has a point to it, and I do not suffer it to lie by and be blunted." Then Julian laughed out. "What avails all this reckoning and debating over a matter that cannot be settled till the main person concerned has been consulted? Bessie, I am very sure, has not the faintest waft of a notion that such schemes are being spun about her, or had not till I spoke with her yestreen. She will never take thee, Fox. Bessie has a good heart and a shrewd understanding, and neither will suffer her to take thee." "You think not?" asked Fox, superciliously. "I am sure she will not," answered Julian. "We shall see," said Fox. "She is not as was her brother, one to fly in the face of a father. He has set his mind to it, and if Julian will not have him, then he will yet have an Anthony Cleverdon to sit on his seat, and reign in his stead, when he has been gathered to his old yeoman fathers." "How mean you?" "Why, thus--I am Anthony. I was thus christened. And if I take Bess, I will throw aside my surname of Crymes, which brings me little--and take that of my father-in-law. So he will have an Anthony Cleverdon to carry on the name, and I--" his face assumed a malevolent expression--"I shall have spoiled for ever his own son's chances. It shall be down in black-and-white, and bound as fast as I can bind him. See if I cannot manage for myself." He stood up, took his hat, and set it jauntily on his head, then at the door turned, and with a mocking laugh, said: "There, sister Jule! Is not that a slap in the face for Anthony that will make his cheek tingle?" He left the room. Mr. Crymes laid his brow in his hand, and his elbow on the table. "'Fore heaven!" he sighed, "I curse the day that gave me such a son." CHAPTER XXXII. MORE JARS. A drizzling rainy day. A day on which nothing could be seen but a wavering veil of minute dust of water. A drizzle that was wetting, and which penetrated everywhere. The air was warm, laden with moisture, oppressive, and depressing. From a window could be seen nothing beyond a hedge. Trees seemed to be bunches of cotton wool; the drizzle crawled or was drawn along by a damp wind over the grass along the hedge, beading every blade and twig with the minutest drops of moisture. The shrubs, the plants stooped, unable to support the burden deposited on them, and shot the impalpable water-dust down on the soil in articulate drops.