The Quaker had become as weak as water in his daughter's hands. To whatever she might have desired he would have given his assent¹. He went daily up from Pegwell Bay to Pogson and Littlebird's, but even then he was an altered man. It had been said there for a few days that his daughter was to become the wife of the eldest² son of the Marquis of Kingsbury, and then it had been said that there could be no such marriage—because of Marion's health. The glory while it lasted he had borne meekly³, but with a certain anxious satisfaction. The pride of his life had been in Marion, and this young lord's choice had justified⁴ his pride. But the glory had been very fleeting⁵. And now it was understood through all Pogson and Littlebird's that their senior clerk had been crushed, not by the loss of his noble son-in-law, but by the cause which produced the loss. Under these circumstances poor Zachary Fay had hardly any will of his own, except to do that which his daughter suggested to him. When she told him that she would wish to go up to London for a few days, he assented⁶ as a matter of course. And when she explained that she wished to do so in order that she might see Lord Hampstead, he only shook his head sadly, and was silent.

"Of course I will come as you wish it," Marion had said in her letter to her lover. "What would I not do that you wish,—except when you wish things that you know you ought not? Mrs. Roden says that I am to go up to be lectured. You mustn't be very hard upon me. I don't think you ought to ask me to do things which you know,—which you know that I cannot do. Oh, my lover! oh, my love! would that it were all over, and that you were free!"

In answer to this, and to other letters of the kind, he wrote to her long argumentative epistles, in which he strove to repress the assurances of his love, in order that he might convince her the better by the strength of his reasoning. He spoke⁷ to her of the will of God, and of the wickedness of which she would be guilty if she took upon herself to

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