“Why don’t you have a special licence at once?” growled the Captain sarcastically. “Because I know my own business best,” said Goddard. “Then I’m blarsted if you’ll have her at all!” “Don’t make a scene, father,” Lizzie entreated. She tried to slip away, but Goddard’s arm tightened and restrained her. He looked with disgust on the ignoble old face that blinked in cantankerous dignity. Save on the ground of pure ill-temper he could not understand his outburst. Lizzie had often told him of the awful rows she had had with her father about nothing at all. But Goddard was not the man to be bullied. “Lizzie is over twenty-one, and I’m going to marry her whether you are blasted or not, Captain Jenkyns. You can take that from me.” “Then you’re a ------er fool than I took you for,” replied the Captain, giving in beneath the young fellow’s strong gaze. “Marry in haste; repent at leisure. You want to make a lady of her. She ain’t going to be no lady. It’s only going to set her off her ’ead. Think she’s going to recognise her poor old father when she lives in a fine ’ouse and dressed in silks and satins? Not a bit of it. I know human natur’, I tell yer. I brought her up to be an honest working man’s wife. That’s what she’s fit for. So that she could give me a bit of dinner on Sundays. Now you’re a going to take her away from her natural surroundings, what she was born in, and make her neither flesh, nor fowl, nor good red ’erring. Think I don’t know? And you, with your ’igh-falutin’ idea about being too good to keep a shop, you ought to marry a duchess instead of a poor old sailor’s gell: that’s what you ought to do.” He produced a flat bottle of rum from his side pocket, filled his half-emptied tea-cup with spirits, and drank the compound to console his poor old sailor’s paternal heart. Goddard, seeing that the storm was over, smiled at the mixture of shrewdness and selfishness in the old man’s speech. Certain home-truths made him wince a little; but the prospect of Captain Jenkyns not finding a seat at his Sunday dinner-table did not present itself to him as in any way pathetic. “Well,” he said good-humouredly, “I am not going to marry a duchess, but a girl as sweet as one. Isn’t that true, Liz? And so there’s an end to the matter. I suppose I can count on you to give her away, Captain?” “Yes, I’ll give her away. Jolly good riddance,” growled the old man. A short while afterwards he rose, filled his clay pipe with cavendish, which he ground fine between his hands, and excusing himself on the score of business, left the two young people to themselves. His destination, however, was a far-off river-side public, where he spent the rest of the evening with his cronies, and informed them, in speech that grew gradually more marked by thickness and profanity, of the approaching splendour of his daughter’s fortunes. “Cheer up, Lizzie,” said Goddard, as she began to clear away the tea-things in silence. “We neither of us mind what he says.”