It naturally shocked her.

She felt, as she had never felt before, how entirely right her father had been in insisting on her resistance to an attachment which was unworthy of her.

So far, but no farther, her conscience yielded to its own conviction of what was just.

But the one unassailable vital force in this world is the force of love.

It may submit to the hard necessities of life; it may acknowledge the imperative claims of duty; it may be silent under reproach, and submissive to privation--but, suffer what it may, it is the master-passion still; subject to no artificial influences, owning no supremacy but the law of its own being.