“Sir, I cannot repent.”
“Repent! Not you! You triumph, no doubt: John Graham, you descended partly from a Highlander and a chief, and there is a trace of the Celt in all you look, speak, and think. You have his cunning and his charm. The red—(Well then, Polly, the fair) hair, the tongue of guile, and brain of wile, are all come down by inheritance.”
“Sir, I feel honest enough,” said Graham; and a genuine English blush covered his face with its warm witness of sincerity. “And yet,” he added, “I won’t deny that in some respects you accuse me justly. In your presence I have always had a thought which I dared not show you. I did truly regard you as the possessor of the most valuable thing the world owns for me. I wished for it: I tried for it. Sir, I ask for it now.”
“John, you ask much.”
“Very much, sir. It must come from your generosity, as a gift; from your justice, as a reward. I can never earn it.”
“Ay! Listen to the Highland tongue!” said Mr. Home. “Look up, Polly! Answer this ‘braw wooer;’ send him away!”
She looked up. She shyly glanced at her eager, handsome suitor. She gazed tenderly on her furrowed sire.
“Papa, I love you both,” said she; “I can take care of you both. I need not send Graham away—he can live here; he will be no inconvenience,” she alleged with that simplicity of phraseology which at times was wont to make both her father and Graham smile. They smiled now.
“He will be a prodigious inconvenience to me,” still persisted Mr. Home. “I don’t want him, Polly, he is too tall; he is in my way. Tell him to march.”
“You will get used to him, papa. He seemed exceedingly tall to me at first—like a tower when I looked up at him; but, on the whole, I would rather not have him otherwise.”