above-named issue: misgivings as to propriety, met by hope of
ultimate exoneration: indignation at parental inconsistency in
first encouraging, then forbidding: a chilling sense of
disobedience, overpowered by a conscientious inability to brook a
breaking of plighted faith with a man who, in essentials, had
remained unaltered from the beginning: a blessed hope that
opposition would turn an erroneous judgement: a bright faith that
things would mend thereby, and wind up well.

Probably the result would, after all, have been nil, had not the
following few remarks been made one day at breakfast.

Her father was in his old hearty spirits. He smiled to himself at
stories too bad to tell, and called Elfride a little scamp for
surreptitiously preserving some blind kittens that ought to have
been drowned. After this expression, she said to him suddenly:

If Mr. Smith had been already in the family, you would not have
been made wretched by discovering he had poor relations?'

'Do you mean in the family by marriage?' he replied inattentively,
and continuing to peel his egg.

The accumulating scarlet told that was her meaning, as much as the
affirmative reply.

'I should have put up with it, no doubt,' Mr. Swancourt observed.

'So that you would not have been driven into hopeless melancholy,
but have made the best of him?'