And
then, mixed with all this, was his feeling of the young man's
arrogance in looking for such a match. Here was a man without a
shilling, whose manifest duty was to go to work so that he might
earn his bread, who instead of doing so, he hoped to raise himself
to wealth and position by entrapping the heart of an unwary girl!
There was something to the Duke's thinking base in this, and much
more base because the unwary girl was his own daughter. That such
a man as Tregear should make an attack upon him and select his
rank, his wealth, and his child as the stepping-stones by which he
intended to rise! What could be so mean as that a man should seek
to live by looking out for a wife with money? But what so
impudent, so arrogant, so unblushingly disregardful of propriety,
as that he should endeavour to select his victim from such a
family as the Pallisers, and that he should lay his impious hand
on the very daughter of the Duke of Omnium?
But together with all this came upon him his moments of ineffable
tenderness. He felt as though he longed to take her in his arms
and tell her, that if she were unhappy, so would he be unhappy
too,--to make her understand that a hard necessity had made his
sorrow common to them both.
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