'You may depend upon it,' continued the captain, 'that if I marry this lady, I shall not trouble you; on the contrary, I think it more likely that you will trouble me.'
'What do you mean, sir?' shouted the commander.
'I have a golden scheme, and it will come off,' said Captain Jackman, with a singular smile lighting up his face.
The commander was silent for at least a minute. A minute is a long time of silence on an occasion of this sort. During the pause he eyed Jackman with a gaze of corkscrews and screwdrivers.
'I see how it is, father,' said Miss Conway, in a voice of bitter contempt, and with a manner daringly defiant. 'You mean to keep me at home all my life--or your life, which may be long, for you take good care of yourself. You mean that I should become a wrinkled old maid, without hopes of a husband, without a chance of getting away from this sickeningly dull hole, merely because it suits you, and it is convenient to you to keep me at home as a companion. You do not love to be alone. I would bear you company willingly,' she cried, with enlarged nostril, 'to your grave, though it should make me sixty years of age, if it were not for your selfishness.'
'Sir,' said the commander, 'you perceive what sort of a young lady you wish to clasp to your heart as a life partner.'
'Have I your consent to our marriage,' answered the tall, handsome Jackman, looking down at Commander Conway with a barely visible curve of contempt at either corner of his mouth.
'He would deny me a sight of life,' shrieked the girl almost hysterically. 'I am to gaze, by his command, on nothing but the ocean. We go nowhere. I take lonely walks. You saw me on one of those lonely walks, Captain Jackman, and I am thankful to remember that I saved your life. My father is selfish, and does not enter into the feelings of the young. _He_ has lived, and we too must live and see life. This gentleman loves me,' she said, laying her hand with fine grace upon the captain's shoulder, and looking at her father with an expression of desperation in her beauty, 'and I love him, and we shall be married.'
The commander, not perhaps relishing the being seated whilst these two continued to tower over him, sprang up and stepped across to the other side of the table.