Ethel’s unlooked-for opposition disconcerted all these projects. She was very grateful, gentle, and almost submissive in her bearing; but she was as steadfast as adamant on the point that it behoved her to return a respectful refusal to Lord Harrogate’s proposals.
‘Do not tempt me,’ she said more than once; ‘do not urge me to forfeit my self-respect, or be false to those who have put trust in me. I am no fit match for the future master of High Tor, the future Earl of Wolverhampton. Would the kind Countess have received me here, would Lady Maud have given me her friendship, had they dreamed of this?’
She was very firm. She let him infer, if he chose, that he was not indifferent to her; but to none of his instances would she yield her steady conviction that duty forbade her to say ‘Yes’ to his entreaties. He became—small blame to him for being so—almost angry, and tried if reproach would succeed where prayer and argument had failed. In vain. His reproaches brought the tears to Ethel’s eyes, but she never faltered in her resolve.
If he pressed her unduly on this point, she said simply that she must go away. Let him forget her, or learn, as she hoped he would, to regard her as a friend, and then she need not leave High Tor. And then——
And then Lady Alice, Ethel’s pupil, made her appearance, and there was no more opportunity for private conversation; and two days later, Lord Harrogate started for Aldershot.
By the term sea-squirts, the naturalist denominates some of the most remarkable animals which it is his province to study. In more polite phraseology the sea-squirts are termed ‘Ascidians,’ this appellation being derived from the Greek _askos_, meaning a wine-skin or Eastern leather-bottle, to which, in outward shape and form the sea-squirts bear a very close resemblance. And as a final designation, the animals under discussion may be known as ‘Tunicates,’ since their bodies are inclosed within a tough bag or ‘tunic,’ the chemical composition of which forms, as we shall presently shew, one of the notable points of their structure. The sea-squirts present themselves to the zoologist as a group of beings exhibiting many exceptions to the ordinary rules of animal organisation; and it may also be noted that they have attained a degree of scientific fame almost exceeding that which their most ardent admirers could have expected. The young sea-squirt has thus been credited in certain scientific speculations with presenting the naturalist and mankind at large with a _fac-simile_ of the early progenitor and far-back ancestor of the whole vertebrate group of animals, including man himself—in other words, it is maintained that the young sea-squirt, through some peculiar process of modification and elevation, has given origin to the highest group of living beings. With the promise before us of obtaining information regarding a most interesting group of animals, which are thus held by some _savants_ to possess relations of no ordinary kind to man himself, the reader will require little incentive to follow out the steps of a brief inquiry into their life-history and relations.