squire turned to me.

But she cried: 'Oh! grandada, hear yourself! or don't, be silent. If
Harry has offended you, speak like one gentleman to another. Don't rob me
of my love for you: I haven't much besides that.'

'No, because of a scoundrel and his young idiot!'

Janet frowned in earnest, and said: 'I don't permit you to change the
meaning of the words I speak.'

He muttered a proverb of the stables. Reduced to behave temperately, he
began the whole history of my bankers' book anew--the same queries, the
same explosions and imprecations.

'Come for a walk with me, dear Harry,' said Janet.

I declined to be protected in such a manner, absurdly on my dignity; and
the refusal, together possibly with some air of contemptuous independence
in the tone of it, brought the squire to a climax. 'You won't go out and
walk with her? You shall go down on your knees to her and beg her to give
you her arm for a walk. By God! you shall, now, here, on the spot, or off
you go to your German princess, with your butler's legacy, and nothing
more from me but good-bye and the door bolted. Now, down with you!'

He expected me to descend.

'And if he did, he would never have my arm.' Janet's eyes glittered hard
on the squire.

'Before that rascal dies, my dear, he shall whine like a beggar out in
the cold for the tips of your fingers!'

'Not if he asks me first,' said Janet.

This set him off again. He realized her prospective generosity, and
contrasted it with my actual obtuseness. Janet changed her tactics. She
assumed indifference. But she wanted experience, and a Heriot to help her
in playing a part. She did it badly--overdid it; so that the old man, now
imagining both of us to be against his scheme for uniting us, counted my
iniquity as twofold. Her phrase, 'Harry and I will always be friends,'
roused the loudest of his denunciations upon me, as though there never
had been question of the princess, so inveterate was his mind's grasp of
its original designs. Friends! Would our being friends give him heirs by
law to his estate and name? And so forth. My aunt Dorothy came to
moderate his invectives. In her room the heavily-burdened little book of
figures was produced, and the items read aloud; and her task was to hear
them without astonishment, but with a business-like desire to comprehend
them accurately, a method that softened the squire's outbursts by
degrees. She threw out hasty running commentaries: 'Yes, that was for a
y