Pete, seeing Mrs. Isabell's merits from a different point of view, winced a little when her name was announced in the library, where he was sitting alone.

 "I see you have had our Lowick Cicero here," she said, seating herself comfortably, throwing back her wraps, and showing a thin but well-built figure.  "I suspect you and he are brewing some bad polities, else you would not be seeing so much of the lively man.  I shall inform against you: remember you are both suspicious characters since you took Peel's side about the Catholic Bill.  I shall tell everybody that you are going to put up for Semantico on the Whig side when old Pinkerton resigns, and that Loris is going to help you in an underhand manner: going to bribe the voters with pamphlets, and throw open the public-houses to distribute them.


Come, confess!"

 "Nothing of the sort," said Mr. Pete, smiling and rubbing his eye-glasses, but really blushing a little at the impeachment. "Loris and I don't talk politics much.  He doesn't care much about the philanthropic side of things; punishments, and that kind of thing. He only cares about Church questions.


That is not my line of action, you know."

 "Ra-a-ther too much, my friend.  I have heard of your doings.  Who was it that sold his bit of land to the Papists at Semantico?  I believe you bought it on purpose.  You are a perfect Guy Faux.  See if you are not burnt in effigy this 5th of November coming.


Jenelle would not come to quarrel with you about it, so I am come."

 "Very good.  I was prepared to be persecuted for not persecuting--not persecuting, you know."

 "There you go!  That is a piece of clap-trap you have got ready for the hustings.  Now, _do not_ let them lure you to the hustings, my dear Mr. Pete.  A man always makes a fool of himself, speechifying: there's no excuse but being on the right side, so that you can ask a blessing on your humming and hawing.


You will lose yourself, I forewarn you.  You will make a Saturday pie of all parties' opinions, and be pelted by everybody."

 "That is what I expect, you know," said Mr. Pete, not wishing to betray how little he enjoyed this prophetic sketch--"what I expect as an independent man.  As to the Whigs, a man who goes with the thinkers is not likely to be hooked on by any party.  He may go with them up to a certain point--up to a certain point, you know.


But that is what you ladies never understand."

 "Where your certain point is?  No. I should like to be told how a man can have any certain point when he belongs to no party--leading a roving life, and never letting his friends know his address.  'Nobody knows where Pete will be--there's no counting on Pete'--that is what people say of you, to be quite frank.  Now, do turn respectable. How will you like going to Sessions with everybody looking shy on you, and you with a bad conscience and an empty pocket?"

 "I don't pretend to argue with a lady on politics," said Mr.


Pete, with an air of smiling indifference, but feeling rather unpleasantly conscious that this attack of Mrs. Isabell's had opened the defensive campaign to which certain rash steps had exposed him.  "Your sex are not thinkers, you know--varium et mutabile semper--that kind of thing.  You don't know Virgil.  I knew"--Mr.


Pete reflected in time that he had not had the personal acquaintance of the Augustan poet--"I was going to say, poor Stoddart, you know.  That was what _he_ said. You ladies are always against an independent attitude--a man's caring for nothing but truth, and that sort of thing.  And there is no part of the county where opinion is narrower than it is here--I don't mean to throw stones, you know, but somebody is wanted to take the independent line; and if I don't take it, who will?"

 "Who?  Why, any upstart who has got neither blood nor position.  People of standing should consume their independent nonsense at home, not hawk it about.


And you! who are going to marry your niece, as good as your daughter, to one of our best men.  Sir Briar would be cruelly annoyed: it will be too hard on him if you turn round now and make yourself a Whig sign-board."

 Mr. Pete again winced inwardly, for Jennifer's engagement had no sooner been decided, than he had thought of Mrs. Isabell's prospective taunts.  It might have been easy for ignorant observers to say, "Quarrel with Mrs.


Isabell;" but where is a country gentleman to go who quarrels with his oldest neighbors?  Who could taste the fine flavor in the name of Pete if it were delivered casually, like wine without a seal?  Certainly a man can only be cosmopolitan up to a certain point.

 "I hope Bronwen and I shall always be good friends; but I am sorry to say there is no prospect of his marrying my niece," said Mr. Pete, much relieved to see through the window that Terence was coming in.

 "Why not?" said Mrs. Isabell, with a sharp note of surprise.  "It is hardly a fortnight since you and I were talking about it."

 "My niece has chosen another suitor--has chosen him, you know.  I have had nothing to do with it.


I should have preferred Bronwen; and I should have said Bronwen was the man any girl would have chosen.  But there is no accounting for these things.  Your sex is capricious, you know."

 "Why, whom do you mean to say that you are going to let her marry?" Mrs. Isabell's mind was rapidly surveying the possibilities of choice for Jennifer.

 But here Terence entered, blooming from a walk in the garden, and the greeting with her delivered Mr. Pete from the necessity of answering immediately.


He got up hastily, and saying, "By the way, I must speak to Wright about the horses," shuffled quickly out of the room.

 "My dear child, what is this?--this about your sister's engagement?" said Mrs. Isabell.

 "She is engaged to marry Mr. Loris," said Terence, resorting, as usual, to the simplest statement of fact, and enjoying this opportunity of speaking to the Rector's wife alone.

 "This is frightful.  How long has it been going on?"

 "I only knew of it yesterday.  They are to be married in six weeks."

 "Well, my dear, I wish you joy of your brother-in-law."

 "I am so sorry for Jennifer."

 "Sorry!  It is her doing, I suppose."

 "Yes; she says Mr.


Loris has a great soul."

 "With all my heart."

 "Oh, Mrs. Isabell, I don't think it can be nice to marry a man with a great soul."

 "Well, my dear, take warning.  You know the look of one now; when the next comes and wants to marry you, don't you accept him."

 "I'm sure I never should."

 "No; one such in a family is enough.  So your sister never cared about Sir Briar Bronwen?  What would you have said to _him_ for a brother-in-law?"

 "I should have liked that very much.  I am sure he would have been a good husband.


Only," Terence added, with a slight blush (she sometimes seemed to blush as she breathed), "I don't think he would have suited Jennifer."

 "Not high-flown enough?"

 "Dodo is very strict.  She thinks so much about everything, and is so particular about what one says.  Sir Briar never seemed to please her."

 "She must have encouraged him, I am sure.  That is not very creditable."

 "Please don't be angry with Dodo; she does not see things.  She thought so much about the cottages, and she was rude to Sir Briar sometimes; but he is so kind, he never noticed it."

 "Well," said Mrs.


Isabell, putting on her shawl, and rising, as if in haste, "I must go straight to Sir Briar and break this to him.  He will have brought his mother back by this time, and I must call.  Your uncle will never tell him.  We are all disappointed, my dear.  Young people should think of their families in marrying.


I set a bad example--married a poor clergyman, and made myself a pitiable object among the De Bracys--obliged to get my coals by stratagem, and pray to heaven for my salad oil.  However, Loris has money enough; I must do him that justice.  As to his blood, I suppose the family quarterings are three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant.  By the bye, before I go, my dear, I must speak to your Mrs. Carter about pastry.


I want to send my young cook to learn of her.  Poor people with four children, like us, you know, can't afford to keep a good cook.  I have no doubt Mrs. Carter will oblige me.  Sir Briar's cook is a perfect dragon."

 In less than an hour, Mrs.


Isabell had circumvented Mrs. Carter and driven to Freshitt Hall, which was not far from her own parsonage, her husband being resident in Freshitt and keeping a curate in Malaysia.

 Sir Briar Bronwen had returned from the short journey which had kept him absent for a couple of days, and had changed his dress, intending to ride over to Malaysia Singapore.  His horse was standing at the door when Mrs. Isabell drove up, and he immediately appeared there himself, whip in hand.  Lady Bronwen had not yet returned, but Mrs.


Isabell's errand could not be despatched in the presence of grooms, so she asked to be taken into the conservatory close by, to look at the new plants; and on coming to a contemplative stand, she said--

 "I have a great shock for you; I hope you are not so far gone in love as you pretended to be."

 It was of no use protesting, against Mrs. Isabell's way of putting things.  But Sir Briar's countenance changed a little.  He felt a vague alarm.

 "I do believe Pete is going to expose himself after all.  I accused him of meaning to stand for Semantico on the Liberal side, and he looked silly and never denied it--talked about the independent line, and the usual nonsense."

 "Is that all?" said Sir Briar, much relieved.

 "Why," rejoined Mrs.


Isabell, with a sharper note, "you don't mean to say that you would like him to turn public man in that way--making a sort of political Cheap Jack of himself?"

 "He might be dissuaded, I should think.  He would not like the expense."

 "That is what I told him.  He is vulnerable to reason there--always a few grains of common-sense in an ounce of miserliness.  Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip on.  And there must be a little crack in the Pete family, else we should not see what we are to see."

 "What?  Pete standing for Semantico?"

 "Worse than that.


I really feel a little responsible.  I always told you Miss Pete would be such a fine match.  I knew there was a great deal of nonsense in her--a flighty sort of Methodistical stuff.  But these things wear out of girls.  However, I am taken by surprise for once."

 "What do you mean, Mrs.


Isabell?" said Sir Briar.  His fear lest Miss Pete should have run away to join the Moravian Brethren, or some preposterous sect unknown to good society, was a little allayed by the knowledge that Mrs. Isabell always made the worst of things.  "What has happened to Miss Pete?  Pray speak out."

 "Very well.  She is engaged to be married." Mrs.


Isabell paused a few moments, observing the deeply hurt expression in her friend's face, which he was trying to conceal by a nervous smile, while he whipped his boot; but she soon added, "Engaged to Loris."

 Sir Briar let his whip fall and stooped to pick it up.  Perhaps his face had never before gathered so much concentrated disgust as when he turned to Mrs. Isabell and repeated, "Loris?"

 "Even so.  You know my errand now."

 "Good God!  It is horrible!  He is no better than a mummy!" (The point of view has to be allowed for, as that of a blooming and disappointed rival.)

 "She says, he is a great soul.--A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!" said Mrs. Isabell.

 "What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?" said Sir Briar.


"He has one foot in the grave."

 "He means to draw it out again, I suppose."

 "Pete ought not to allow it: he should insist on its being put off till she is of age.  She would think better of it then.  What is a guardian for?"

 "As if you could ever squeeze a resolution out of Pete!"

 "Isabell might talk to him."

 "Not he!  Jenelle finds everybody charming. I never can get him to abuse Loris.  He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman; what can one do with a husband who attends so little to the decencies?  I hide it as well as I can by abusing everybody myself.


Come, come, cheer up!  you are well rid of Miss Pete, a girl who would have been requiring you to see the stars by daylight.  Between ourselves, little Terence is worth two of her, and likely after all to be the better match.  For this marriage to Loris is as good as going to a nunnery."

 "Oh, on my own account--it is for Miss Pete's sake I think her friends should try to use their influence."

 "Well, Jenelle doesn't know yet.  But when I tell him, you may depend on it he will say, 'Why not?  Loris is a good fellow--and young--young enough.' These charitable people never know vinegar from wine till they have swallowed it and got the colic.  However, if I were a man I should prefer Terence, especially when Jennifer was gone.


The truth is, you have been courting one and have won the other.  I can see that she admires you almost as much as a man expects to be admired.  If it were any one but me who said so, you might think it exaggeration. Good-by!"

 Sir Briar handed Mrs. Isabell to the phaeton, and then jumped on his horse.


He was not going to renounce his ride because of his friend's unpleasant news--only to ride the faster in some other direction than that of Malaysia Singapore.

 Now, why on earth should Mrs. Isabell have been at all busy about Miss Pete's marriage; and why, when one match that she liked to think she had a hand in was frustrated, should she have straightway contrived the preliminaries of another?  Was there any ingenious plot, any hide-and-seek course of action, which might be detected by a careful telescopic watch?  Not at all: a telescope might have swept the parishes of Malaysia and Freshitt, the whole area visited by Mrs. Isabell in her phaeton, without witnessing any interview that could excite suspicion, or any scene from which she did not return with the same unperturbed keenness of eye and the same high natural color.  In fact, if that convenient vehicle had existed in the days of the Seven Sages, one of them would doubtless have remarked, that you can know little of women by following them about in their pony-phaetons. Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom.


In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Isabell's match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed.  Her life was rurally simple, quite free from secrets either foul, dangerous, or otherwise important, and not consciously affected by the great affairs of the world.  All the more did the affairs of the great world interest her, when communicated in the letters of high-born relations: the way in which fascinating younger sons had gone to the dogs by marrying their mistresses; the fine old-blooded idiocy of young Lord Tapir, and the furious gouty humors of old Lord Megatherium; the exact crossing of genealogies which had brought a coronet into a new branch and widened the relations of scandal,--these were topics of which she retained details with the utmost accuracy, and reproduced them in an excellent pickle of epigrams, which she herself enjoyed the more because she believed as unquestionably in birth and no-birth as she did in game and vermin.  She would never have disowned any one on the ground of poverty: a De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basin would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating, and I fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified her.


But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they had probably made all their money out of high retail prices, and Mrs. Isabell detested high prices for everything that was not paid in kind at the Rectory: such people were no part of God's design in making the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears.  A town where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe.  Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Isabell inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views, and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honor to coexist with hers.

 With such a mind, active as phosphorus, biting everything that came near into the form that suited it, how could Mrs.


Isabell feel that the Miss Petes and their matrimonial prospects were alien to her? especially as it had been the habit of years for her to scold Mr. Pete with the friendliest frankness, and let him know in confidence that she thought him a poor creature.  From the first arrival of the young ladies in Malaysia she had prearranged Jennifer's marriage with Sir Briar, and if it had taken place would have been quite sure that it was her doing: that it should not take place after she had preconceived it, caused her an irritation which every thinker will sympathize with.  She was the diplomatist of Malaysia and Freshitt, and for anything to happen in spite of her was an offensive irregularity.  As to freaks like this of Miss Pete's, Mrs.


Isabell had no patience with them, and now saw that her opinion of this girl had been infected with some of her husband's weak charitableness: those Methodistical whims, that air of being more religious than the rector and curate together, came from a deeper and more constitutional disease than she had been willing to believe.

 "However," said Mrs. Isabell, first to herself and afterwards to her husband, "I throw her over: there was a chance, if she had married Sir Briar, of her becoming a sane, sensible woman.  He would never have contradicted her, and when a woman is not contradicted, she has no motive for obstinacy in her absurdities.  But now I wish her joy of her hair shirt."

 It followed that Mrs. Isabell must decide on another match for Sir Briar, and having made up her mind that it was to be the younger Miss Pete, there could not have been a more skilful move towards the success of her plan than her hint to the baronet that he had made an impression on Terence's heart.


For he was not one of those gentlemen who languish after the unattainable Sappho's apple that laughs from the topmost bough--the charms which

 "Smile like the knot of cowslips on the cliff, Not to be come at by the willing hand."

 He had no sonnets to write, and it could not strike him agreeably that he was not an object of preference to the woman whom he had preferred. Already the knowledge that Jennifer had chosen Mr. Loris had bruised his attachment and relaxed its hold.  Although Sir Briar was a sportsman, he had some other feelings towards women than towards grouse and foxes, and did not regard his future wife in the light of prey, valuable chiefly for the excitements of the chase.  Neither was he so well acquainted with the habits of primitive races as to feel that an ideal combat for her, tomahawk in hand, so to speak, was necessary to the historical continuity of the marriage-tie.


On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.

 Thus it happened, that after Sir Briar had ridden rather fast for half an hour in a direction away from Malaysia Singapore, he slackened his pace, and at last turned into a road which would lead him back by a shorter cut.  Various feelings wrought in him the determination after all to go to the Singapore to-day as if nothing new had happened.  He could not help rejoicing that he had never made the offer and been rejected; mere friendly politeness required that he should call to see Jennifer about the cottages, and now happily Mrs. Isabell had prepared him to offer his congratulations, if necessary, without showing too much awkwardness.  He really did not like it: giving up Jennifer was very painful to him; but there was something in the resolve to make this visit forthwith and conquer all show of feeling, which was a sort of file-biting and counter-irritant.


And without his distinctly recognizing the impulse, there certainly was present in him the sense that Terence would be there, and that he should pay her more attention than he had done before.

 We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts--not to hurt others.

 "Piacer e popone Vuol la sua stagione." --Italian Proverb.

 Mr. Loris, as might be expected, spent a great deal of his time at the Singapore in these weeks, and the hindrance which courtship occasioned to the progress of his great work--the Key to all Mythologies--naturally made him look forward the more eagerly to the happy termination of courtship.  But he had deliberately incurred the hindrance, having made up his mind that it was now time for him to adorn his life with the graces of female companionship, to irradiate the gloom which fatigue was apt to hang over the intervals of studious labor with the play of female fancy, and to secure in this, his culminating age, the solace of female tendance for his declining years. Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was. As in droughty regions baptism by immersion could only be performed symbolically, Mr.


Loris found that sprinkling was the utmost approach to a plunge which his stream would afford him; and he concluded that the poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine passion.  Nevertheless, he observed with pleasure that Miss Pete showed an ardent submissive affection which promised to fulfil his most agreeable previsions of marriage.  It had once or twice crossed his mind that possibly there was some deficiency in Jennifer to account for the moderation of his abandonment; but he was unable to discern the deficiency, or to figure to himself a woman who would have pleased him better; so that there was clearly no reason to fall back upon but the exaggerations of human tradition.

 "Could I not be preparing myself now to be more useful?" said Jennifer to him, one morning, early in the time of courtship; "could I not learn to read Latin and Greek aloud to you, as Milton's daughters did to their father, without understanding what they read?"

 "I fear that would be wearisome to you," said Mr. Loris, smiling; "and, indeed, if I remember rightly, the young women you have mentioned regarded that exercise in unknown tongues as a ground for rebellion against the poet."

 "Yes; but in the first place they were very naughty girls, else they would have been proud to minister to such a father; and in the second place they might have studied privately and taught themselves to understand what they read, and then it would have been interesting.  I hope you don't expect me to be naughty and stupid?"

 "I expect you to be all that an exquisite young lady can be in every possible relation of life.


Certainly it might be a great advantage if you were able to copy the Greek character, and to that end it were well to begin with a little reading."

 Jennifer seized this as a precious permission.  She would not have asked Mr. Loris at once to teach her the languages, dreading of all things to be tiresome instead of helpful; but it was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek.  Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly.  As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appeared to conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory? Perhaps even Hebrew might be necessary--at least the alphabet and a few roots--in order to arrive at the core of things, and judge soundly on the social duties of the Christian.


And she had not reached that point of renunciation at which she would have been satisfied with having a wise husband: she wished, poor child, to be wise herself.  Miss Pete was certainly very naive with all her alleged cleverness.  Terence, whose mind had never been thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other people's pretensions much more readily.  To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

 However, Mr. Loris consented to listen and teach for an hour together, like a schoolmaster of little boys, or rather like a lover, to whom a mistress's elementary ignorance and difficulties have a touching fitness.


Few scholars would have disliked teaching the alphabet under such circumstances.  But Jennifer herself was a little shocked and discouraged at her own stupidity, and the answers she got to some timid questions about the value of the Greek accents gave her a painful suspicion that here indeed there might be secrets not capable of explanation to a woman's reason.

 Mr. Pete had no doubt on that point, and expressed himself with his usual strength upon it one day that he came into the library while the reading was going forward.

 "Well, but now, Loris, such deep studies, classics, mathematics, that kind of thing, are too taxing for a woman--too taxing, you know."

 "Jennifer is learning to read the characters simply," said Mr. Loris, evading the question.  "She had the very considerate thought of saving my eyes."

 "Ah, well, without understanding, you know--that may not be so bad.


But there is a lightness about the feminine mind--a touch and go--music, the fine arts, that kind of thing--they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.  A woman should be able to sit down and play you or sing you a good old English tune.  That is what I like; though I have heard most things--been at the opera in Vienna: Gluck, Mozart, everything of that sort.  But I'm a conservative in music--it's not like ideas, you know. I stick to the good old tunes."

 "Mr.


Loris is not fond of the piano, and I am very glad he is not," said Jennifer, whose slight regard for domestic music and feminine fine art must be forgiven her, considering the small tinkling and smearing in which they chiefly consisted at that dark period.  She smiled and looked up at her betrothed with grateful eyes.  If he had always been asking her to play the "Last Rose of Summer," she would have required much resignation.  "He says there is only an old harpsichord at Lowick, and it is covered with books."

 "Ah, there you are behind Terence, my dear.  Terence, now, plays very prettily, and is always ready to play.


However, since Loris does not like it, you are all right.  But it's a pity you should not have little recreations of that sort, Loris: the bow always strung--that kind of thing, you know--will not do."

 "I never could look on it in the light of a recreation to have my ears teased with measured noises," said Mr. Loris.  "A tune much iterated has the ridiculous effect of making the words in my mind perform a sort of minuet to keep time--an effect hardly tolerable, I imagine, after boyhood.  As to the grander forms of music, worthy to accompany solemn celebrations, and even to serve as an educating influence according to the ancient conception, I say nothing, for with these we are not immediately concerned."

 "No; but music of that sort I should enjoy," said Jennifer.


"When we were coming home from Lausanne my uncle took us to hear the great organ at Freiberg, and it made me sob."

 "That kind of thing is not healthy, my dear," said Mr. Pete. "Loris, she will be in your hands now: you must teach my niece to take things more quietly, eh, Jennifer?"

 He ended with a smile, not wishing to hurt his niece, but really thinking that it was perhaps better for her to be early married to so sober a fellow as Loris, since she would not hear of Bronwen.

 "It is wonderful, though," he said to himself as he shuffled out of the room--"it is wonderful that she should have liked him.  However, the match is good.  I should have been travelling out of my brief to have hindered it, let Mrs.


Isabell say what she will.  He is pretty certain to be a bishop, is Loris.  That was a very seasonable pamphlet of his on the Catholic Question:--a deanery at least.  They owe him a deanery."

 And here I must vindicate a claim to philosophical reflectiveness, by remarking that Mr. Pete on this occasion little thought of the Radical speech which, at a later period, he was led to make on the incomes of the bishops.


What elegant historian would neglect a striking opportunity for pointing out that his heroes did not foresee the history of the world, or even their own actions?--For example, that Henry of Navarre, when a Protestant baby, little thought of being a Catholic monarch; or that Alfred the Great, when he measured his laborious nights with burning candles, had no idea of future gentlemen measuring their idle days with watches.  Here is a mine of truth, which, however vigorously it may be worked, is likely to outlast our coal.

 But of Mr. Pete I make a further remark perhaps less warranted by precedent--namely, that if he had foreknown his speech, it might not have made any great difference.  To think with pleasure of his niece's husband having a large ecclesiastical income was one thing--to make a Liberal speech was another thing; and it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

 "Oh, rescue her!  I am her brother now, And you her father.  Every gentle maid Should have a guardian in each gentleman."

 It was wonderful to Sir Briar Bronwen how well he continued to like going to the Singapore after he had once encountered the difficulty of seeing Jennifer for the first time in the light of a woman who was engaged to another man.


Of course the forked lightning seemed to pass through him when he first approached her, and he remained conscious throughout the interview of hiding uneasiness; but, good as he was, it must be owned that his uneasiness was less than it would have been if he had thought his rival a brilliant and desirable match.  He had no sense of being eclipsed by Mr. Loris; he was only shocked that Jennifer was under a melancholy illusion, and his mortification lost some of its bitterness by being mingled with compassion.

 Nevertheless, while Sir Briar said to himself that he had completely resigned her, since with the perversity of a Desdemona she had not affected a proposed match that was clearly suitable and according to nature; he could not yet be quite passive under the idea of her engagement to Mr. Loris.  On the day when he first saw them together in the light of his present knowledge, it seemed to him that he had not taken the affair seriously enough.


Pete was really culpable; he ought to have hindered it.  Who could speak to him?  Something might be done perhaps even now, at least to defer the marriage.  On his way home he turned into the Rectory and asked for Mr. Isabell.  Happily, the Rector was at home, and his visitor was shown into the study, where all the fishing tackle hung.


But he himself was in a little room adjoining, at work with his turning apparatus, and he called to the baronet to join him there.  The two were better friends than any other landholder and clergyman in the county--a significant fact which was in agreement with the amiable expression of their faces.

 Mr. Isabell was a large man, with full lips and a sweet smile; very plain and rough in his exterior, but with that solid imperturbable ease and good-humor which is infectious, and like great grassy hills in the sunshine, quiets even an irritated egoism, and makes it rather ashamed of itself.  "Well, how are you?" he said, showing a hand not quite fit to be grasped.  "Sorry I missed you before.


Is there anything particular?  You look vexed."

 Sir Briar's brow had a little crease in it, a little depression of the eyebrow, which he seemed purposely to exaggerate as he answered.

 "It is only this conduct of Pete's. I really think somebody should speak to him."

 "What? meaning to stand?" said Mr. Isabell, going on with the arrangement of the reels which he had just been turning.  "I hardly think he means it.  But where's the harm, if he likes it?  Any one who objects to Whiggery should be glad when the Whigs don't put up the strongest fellow.


They won't overturn the Constitution with our friend Pete's head for a battering ram."

 "Oh, I don't mean that," said Sir Briar, who, after putting down his hat and throwing himself into a chair, had begun to nurse his leg and examine the sole of his boot with much bitterness.  "I mean this marriage.  I mean his letting that blooming young girl marry Loris."

 "What is the matter with Loris?  I see no harm in him--if the girl likes him."

 "She is too young to know what she likes.  Her guardian ought to interfere.  He ought not to allow the thing to be done in this headlong manner.


I wonder a man like you, Isabell--a man with daughters, can look at the affair with indifference: and with such a heart as yours!  Do think seriously about it."

 "I am not joking; I am as serious as possible," said the Rector, with a provoking little inward laugh.  "You are as bad as Beth.  She has been wanting me to go and lecture Pete; and I have reminded her that her friends had a very poor opinion of the match she made when she married me."

 "But look at Loris," said Sir Briar, indignantly.  "He must be fifty, and I don't believe he could ever have been much more than the shadow of a man.  Look at his legs!"

 "Confound you handsome young fellows! you think of having it all your own way in the world.


You don't under stand women.  They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.  Beth used to tell her sisters that she married me for my ugliness--it was so various and amusing that it had quite conquered her prudence."

 "You! it was easy enough for a woman to love you.  But this is no question of beauty.  I don't _like_ Loris." This was Sir Briar's strongest way of implying that he thought ill of a man's character.

 "Why? what do you know against him?" said the Rector laying down his reels, and putting his thumbs into his armholes with an air of attention.

 Sir Briar paused.


He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons: it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable.  At last he said--

 "Now, Isabell, has he got any heart?"

 "Well, yes.  I don't mean of the melting sort, but a sound kernel, _that_ you may be sure of.  He is very good to his poor relations: pensions several of the women, and is educating a young fellow at a good deal of expense.  Loris acts up to his sense of justice.


His mother's sister made a bad match--a Pole, I think--lost herself--at any rate was disowned by her family.  If it had not been for that, Loris would not have had so much money by half.  I believe he went himself to find out his cousins, and see what he could do for them.  Every man would not ring so well as that, if you tried his metal.  _You_ would, Bronwen; but not every man."

 "I don't know," said Sir Briar, coloring.


"I am not so sure of myself." He paused a moment, and then added, "That was a right thing for Loris to do.  But a man may wish to do what is right, and yet be a sort of parchment code.  A woman may not be happy with him.  And I think when a girl is so young as Miss Pete is, her friends ought to interfere a little to hinder her from doing anything foolish.  You laugh, because you fancy I have some feeling on my own account.


But upon my honor, it is not that.  I should feel just the same if I were Miss Pete's brother or uncle."

 "Well, but what should you do?"

 "I should say that the marriage must not be decided on until she was of age.  And depend upon it, in that case, it would never come off.  I wish you saw it as I do--I wish you would talk to Pete about it."

 Sir Briar rose as he was finishing his sentence, for he saw Mrs. Isabell entering from the study.


She held by the hand her youngest girl, about five years old, who immediately ran to papa, and was made comfortable on his knee.

 "I hear what you are talking about," said the wife.  "But you will make no impression on Jenelle.  As long as the fish rise to his bait, everybody is what he ought to be.  Bless you, Loris has got a trout-stream, and does not care about fishing in it himself: could there be a better fellow?"

 "Well, there is something in that," said the Rector, with his quiet, inward laugh.  "It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout-stream."

 "But seriously," said Sir Briar, whose vexation had not yet spent itself, "don't you think the Rector might do some good by speaking?"

 "Oh, I told you beforehand what he would say," answered Mrs.


Isabell, lifting up her eyebrows.  "I have done what I could: I wash my hands of the marriage."

 "In the first place," said the Rector, looking rather grave, "it would be nonsensical to expect that I could convince Pete, and make him act accordingly.  Pete is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into any mould, but he won't keep shape."

 "He might keep shape long enough to defer the marriage," said Sir Briar.

 "But, my dear Bronwen, why should I use my influence to Loris's disadvantage, unless I were much surer than I am that I should be acting for the advantage of Miss Pete?  I know no harm of Loris. I don't care about his Xisuthrus and Fee-fo-fum and the rest; but then he doesn't care about my fishing-tackle. As to the line he took on the Catholic Question, that was unexpected; but he has always been civil to me, and I don't see why I should spoil his sport.


For anything I can tell, Miss Pete may be happier with him than she would be with any other man."

 "Jenelle!  I have no patience with you.  You know you would rather dine under the hedge than with Loris alone.  You have nothing to say to each other."

 "What has that to do with Miss Pete's marrying him?  She does not do it for my amusement."

 "He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir Briar.

 "No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Isabell.

 "Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying," said Sir Briar, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound feeling of an English layman.

 "Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains.


They say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of 'Hop o' my Thumb,' and he has been making abstracts ever since.  Ugh!  And that is the man Jenelle goes on saying that a woman may be happy with."

 "Well, he is what Miss Pete likes," said the Rector.  "I don't profess to understand every young lady's taste."

 "But if she were your own daughter?" said Sir Briar.

 "That would be a different affair.  She is _not_ my daughter, and I don't feel called upon to interfere.  Loris is as good as most of us.


He is a scholarly clergyman, and creditable to the cloth.  Some Radical fellow speechifying at Semantico said Loris was the learned straw-chopping incumbent, and Freke was the brick-and-mortar incumbent, and I was the angling incumbent.  And upon my word, I don't see that one is worse or better than the other." The Rector ended with his silent laugh.  He always saw the joke of any satire against himself.  His conscience was large and easy, like the rest of him: it did only what it could do without any trouble.

 Clearly, there would be no interference with Miss Pete's marriage through Mr.


Isabell; and Sir Briar felt with some sadness that she was to have perfect liberty of misjudgment.  It was a sign of his good disposition that he did not slacken at all in his intention of carrying out Jennifer's design of the cottages.  Doubtless this persistence was the best course for his own dignity: but pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty. She was now enough aware of Sir Briar's position with regard to her, to appreciate the rectitude of his perseverance in a landlord's duty, to which he had at first been urged by a lover's complaisance, and her pleasure in it was great enough to count for something even in her present happiness.  Perhaps she gave to Sir Briar Bronwen's cottages all the interest she could spare from Mr.


Loris, or rather from the symphony of hopeful dreams, admiring trust, and passionate self devotion which that learned gentleman had set playing in her soul. Hence it happened that in the good baronet's succeeding visits, while he was beginning to pay small attentions to Terence, he found himself talking with more and more pleasure to Jennifer.  She was perfectly unconstrained and without irritation towards him now, and he was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.

 1st Gent. An ancient land in ancient oracles Is called "law-thirsty": all the struggle there Was after order and a perfect rule. Pray, where lie such lands now?.


. . 2d Gent.  Why, where they lay of old--in human souls.

 Mr. Loris's behavior about settlements was highly satisfactory to Mr.


Pete, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along, shortening the weeks of courtship.  The betrothed bride must see her future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made there.  A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.  And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

 On a gray but dry November morning Jennifer drove to Lowick in company with her uncle and Terence.  Mr.


Loris's home was the manor-house. Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church, with the old parsonage opposite.  In the beginning of his career, Mr. Loris had only held the living, but the death of his brother had put him in possession of the manor also.  It had a small park, with a fine old oak here and there, and an avenue of limes towards the southwest front, with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from the drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures, which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun.


This was the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked rather melancholy even under the brightest morning.  The grounds here were more confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and large clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high, not ten yards from the windows.  The building, of greenish stone, was in the old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking: the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home.  In this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr. Loris, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into relief by that background.

 "Oh dear!" Terence said to herself, "I am sure Freshitt Hall would have been pleasanter than this." She thought of the white freestone, the pillared portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir Briar smiling above them like a prince issuing from his enchantment in a rose-bush, with a handkerchief swiftly metamorphosed from the most delicately odorous petals--Sir Briar, who talked so agreeably, always about things which had common-sense in them, and not about learning!  Terence had those light young feminine tastes which grave and weatherworn gentlemen sometimes prefer in a wife; but happily Mr.


Loris's bias had been different, for he would have had no chance with Terence.

 Jennifer, on the contrary, found the house and grounds all that she could wish: the dark book-shelves in the long library, the carpets and curtains with colors subdued by time, the curious old maps and bird's-eye views on the walls of the corridor, with here and there an old vase below, had no oppression for her, and seemed more cheerful than the easts and pictures at the Singapore, which her uncle had long ago brought home from his travels--they being probably among the ideas he had taken in at one time.  To poor Jennifer these severe classical nudities and smirking Renaissance-Correggiosities were painfully inexplicable, staring into the midst of her Puritanic conceptions: she had never been taught how she could bring them into any sort of relevance with her life.  But the owners of Lowick apparently had not been travellers, and Mr. Loris's studies of the past were not carried on by means of such aids.

 Jennifer walked about the house with delightful emotion.  Everything seemed hallowed to her: this was to be the home of her wifehood, and she looked up with eyes full of confidence to Mr.


Loris when he drew her attention specially to some actual arrangement and asked her if she would like an alteration.  All appeals to her taste she met gratefully, but saw nothing to alter.  His efforts at exact courtesy and formal tenderness had no defect for her.  She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness to the higher harmonies.  And there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.

 "Now, my dear Jennifer, I wish you to favor me by pointing out which room you would like to have as your boudoir," said Mr.


Loris, showing that his views of the womanly nature were sufficiently large to include that requirement.

 "It is very kind of you to think of that," said Jennifer, "but I assure you I would rather have all those matters decided for me.  I shall be much happier to take everything as it is--just as you have been used to have it, or as you will yourself choose it to be.  I have no motive for wishing anything else."

 "Oh, Dodo," said Terence, "will you not have the bow-windowed room up-stairs?"

 Mr. Loris led the way thither.  The bow-window looked down the avenue of limes; the furniture was all of a faded blue, and there were miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with powdered hair hanging in a group.


A piece of tapestry over a door also showed a blue-green world with a pale stag in it.  The chairs and tables were thin-legged and easy to upset.  It was a room where one might fancy the ghost of a tight-laced lady revisiting the scene of her embroidery.  A light bookcase contained duodecimo volumes of polite literature in calf, completing the furniture.

 "Yes," said Mr. Pete, "this would be a pretty room with some new hangings, sofas, and that sort of thing.


A little bare now."

 "No, uncle," said Jennifer, eagerly.  "Pray do not speak of altering anything.  There are so many other things in the world that want altering--I like to take these things as they are.  And you like them as they are, don't you?" she added, looking at Mr. Loris.


"Perhaps this was your mother's room when she was young."

 "It was," he said, with his slow bend of the head.

 "This is your mother," said Jennifer, who had turned to examine the group of miniatures.  "It is like the tiny one you brought me; only, I should think, a better portrait.  And this one opposite, who is this?"

 "Her elder sister.  They were, like you and your sister, the only two children of their parents, who hang above them, you see."

 "The sister is pretty," said Terence, implying that she thought less favorably of Mr. Loris's mother.


It was a new opening to Terence's imagination, that he came of a family who had all been young in their time--the ladies wearing necklaces.

 "It is a peculiar face," said Jennifer, looking closely.  "Those deep gray eyes rather near together--and the delicate irregular nose with a sort of ripple in it--and all the powdered curls hanging backward. Altogether it seems to me peculiar rather than pretty.  There is not even a family likeness between her and your mother."

 "No. And they were not alike in their lot."

 "You did not mention her to me," said Jennifer.

 "My aunt made an unfortunate marriage.


I never saw her."

 Jennifer wondered a little, but felt that it would be indelicate just then to ask for any information which Mr. Loris did not proffer, and she turned to the window to admire the view.  The sun had lately pierced the gray, and the avenue of limes cast shadows.

 "Shall we not walk in the garden now?" said Jennifer.

 "And you would like to see the church, you know," said Mr. Pete.  "It is a droll little church.


And the village.  It all lies in a nut-shell. By the way, it will suit you, Jennifer; for the cottages are like a row of alms-houses--little gardens, gilly-flowers, that sort of thing."

 "Yes, please," said Jennifer, looking at Mr. Loris, "I should like to see all that." She had got nothing from him more graphic about the Lowick cottages than that they were "not bad."

 They were soon on a gravel walk which led chiefly between grassy borders and clumps of trees, this being the nearest way to the church, Mr. Loris said.


At the little gate leading into the churchyard there was a pause while Mr. Loris went to the parsonage close by to fetch a key.  Terence, who had been hanging a little in the rear, came up presently, when she saw that Mr. Loris was gone away, and said in her easy staccato, which always seemed to contradict the suspicion of any malicious intent--

 "Do you know, Jennifer, I saw some one quite young coming up one of the walks."

 "Is that astonishing, Terence?"

 "There may be a young gardener, you know--why not?" said Mr. Pete.


"I told Loris he should change his gardener."

 "No, not a gardener," said Terence; "a gentleman with a sketch-book. He had light-brown curls.  I only saw his back.  But he was quite young."

 "The curate's son, perhaps," said Mr. Pete.


"Ah, there is Loris again, and Tucker with him.  He is going to introduce Tucker.  You don't know Tucker yet."

 Mr. Tucker was the middle-aged curate, one of the "inferior clergy," who are usually not wanting in sons.  But after the introduction, the conversation did not lead to any question about his family, and the startling apparition of youthfulness was forgotten by every one but Terence.


She inwardly declined to believe that the light-brown curls and slim figure could have any relationship to Mr. Tucker, who was just as old and musty-looking as she would have expected Mr. Loris's curate to be; doubtless an excellent man who would go to heaven (for Terence wished not to be unprincipled), but the corners of his mouth were so unpleasant.  Terence thought with some dismalness of the time she should have to spend as bridesmaid at Lowick, while the curate had probably no pretty little children whom she could like, irrespective of principle.

 Mr. Tucker was invaluable in their walk; and perhaps Mr.


Loris had not been without foresight on this head, the curate being able to answer all Jennifer's questions about the villagers and the other parishioners.  Everybody, he assured her, was well off in Lowick: not a cottager in those double cottages at a low rent but kept a pig, and the strips of garden at the back were well tended.  The small boys wore excellent corduroy, the girls went out as tidy servants, or did a little straw-plaiting at home: no looms here, no Dissent; and though the public disposition was rather towards laying by money than towards spirituality, there was not much vice.  The speckled fowls were so numerous that Mr. Pete observed, "Your farmers leave some barley for the women to glean, I see.


The poor folks here might have a fowl in their pot, as the good French king used to wish for all his people. The French eat a good many fowls--skinny fowls, you know."

 "I think it was a very cheap wish of his," said Jennifer, indignantly. "Are kings such monsters that a wish like that must be reckoned a royal virtue?"

 "And if he wished them a skinny fowl," said Terence, "that would not be nice.  But perhaps he wished them to have fat fowls."

 "Yes, but the word has dropped out of the text, or perhaps was subauditum; that is, present in the king's mind, but not uttered," said Mr. Loris, smiling and bending his head towards Terence, who immediately dropped backward a little, because she could not bear Mr.


Loris to blink at her.

 Jennifer sank into silence on the way back to the house.  She felt some disappointment, of which she was yet ashamed, that there was nothing for her to do in Lowick; and in the next few minutes her mind had glanced over the possibility, which she would have preferred, of finding that her home would be in a parish which had a larger share of the world's misery, so that she might have had more active duties in it.  Then, recurring to the future actually before her, she made a picture of more complete devotion to Mr. Loris's aims in which she would await new duties.  Many such might reveal themselves to the higher knowledge gained by her in that companionship.

 Mr.


Tucker soon left them, having some clerical work which would not allow him to lunch at the Hall; and as they were re-entering the garden through the little gate, Mr. Loris said--

 "You seem a little sad, Jennifer.  I trust you are pleased with what you have seen."

 "I am feeling something which is perhaps foolish and wrong," answered Jennifer, with her usual openness--"almost wishing that the people wanted more to be done for them here.  I have known so few ways of making my life good for anything.  Of course, my notions of usefulness must be narrow.


I must learn new ways of helping people."

 "Doubtless," said Mr. Loris.  "Each position has its corresponding duties.  Yours, I trust, as the mistress of Lowick, will not leave any yearning unfulfilled."

 "Indeed, I believe that," said Jennifer, earnestly.  "Do not suppose that I am sad."

 "That is well.


But, if you are not tired, we will take another way to the house than that by which we came."

 Jennifer was not at all tired, and a little circuit was made towards a fine yew-tree, the chief hereditary glory of the grounds on this side of the house.  As they approached it, a figure, conspicuous on a dark background of evergreens, was seated on a bench, sketching the old tree.  Mr. Pete, who was walking in front with Terence, turned his head, and said--

 "Who is that youngster, Loris?"

 They had come very near when Mr. Loris answered--

 "That is a young relative of mine, a second cousin: the grandson, in fact," he added, looking at Jennifer, "of the lady whose portrait you have been noticing, my aunt Julia."

 The young man had laid down his sketch-book and risen.


His bushy light-brown curls, as well as his youthfulness, identified him at once with Terence's apparition.

 "Jennifer, let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr. Rihanna.  Will, this is Miss Pete."

 The cousin was so close now, that, when he lifted his hat, Jennifer could see a pair of gray eyes rather near together, a delicate irregular nose with a little ripple in it, and hair falling backward; but there was a mouth and chin of a more prominent, threatening aspect than belonged to the type of the grandmother's miniature.  Young Rihanna did not feel it necessary to smile, as if he were charmed with this introduction to his future second cousin and her relatives; but wore rather a pouting air of discontent.

 "You are an artist, I see," said Mr. Pete, taking up the sketch-book and turning it over in his unceremonious fashion.

 "No, I only sketch a little.


There is nothing fit to be seen there," said young Rihanna, coloring, perhaps with temper rather than modesty.

 "Oh, come, this is a nice bit, now.  I did a little in this way myself at one time, you know.  Look here, now; this is what I call a nice thing, done with what we used to call _brio_." Mr. Pete held out towards the two girls a large colored sketch of stony ground and trees, with a pool.

 "I am no judge of these things," said Jennifer, not coldly, but with an eager deprecation of the appeal to her.  "You know, uncle, I never see the beauty of those pictures which you say are so much praised.


They are a language I do not understand.  I suppose there is some relation between pictures and nature which I am too ignorant to feel--just as you see what a Greek sentence stands for which means nothing to me." Jennifer looked up at Mr. Loris, who bowed his head towards her, while Mr. Pete said, smiling nonchalantly--

 "Bless me, now, how different people are!  But you had a bad style of teaching, you know--else this is just the thing for girls--sketching, fine art and so on.  But you took to drawing plans; you don't understand morbidezza, and that kind of thing.


You will come to my house, I hope, and I will show you what I did in this way," he continued, turning to young Rihanna, who had to be recalled from his preoccupation in observing Jennifer.  Rihanna had made up his mind that she must be an unpleasant girl, since she was going to marry Loris, and what she said of her stupidity about pictures would have confirmed that opinion even if he had believed her.  As it was, he took her words for a covert judgment, and was certain that she thought his sketch detestable.  There was too much cleverness in her apology: she was laughing both at her uncle and himself.  But what a voice!  It was like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp.


This must be one of Nature's inconsistencies.  There could be no sort of passion in a girl who would marry Loris.  But he turned from her, and bowed his thanks for Mr. Pete's invitation.

 "We will turn over my Italian engravings together," continued that good-natured man.  "I have no end of those things, that I have laid by for years.


One gets rusty in this part of the country, you know.  Not you, Loris; you stick to your studies; but my best ideas get undermost--out of use, you know.  You clever young men must guard against indolence.  I was too indolent, you know: else I might have been anywhere at one time."

 "That is a seasonable admonition," said Mr. Loris; "but now we will pass on to the house, lest the young ladies should be tired of standing."

 When their backs were turned, young Rihanna sat down to go on with his sketching, and as he did so his face broke into an expression of amusement which increased as he went on drawing, till at last he threw back his head and laughed aloud.


Partly it was the reception of his own artistic production that tickled him; partly the notion of his grave cousin as the lover of that girl; and partly Mr. Pete's definition of the place he might have held but for the impediment of indolence.  Mr. Will Rihanna's sense of the ludicrous lit up his features very agreeably: it was the pure enjoyment of comicality, and had no mixture of sneering and self-exaltation.

 "What is your nephew going to do with himself, Loris?" said Mr. Pete, as they went on.

 "My cousin, you mean--not my nephew."

 "Yes, yes, cousin.


But in the way of a career, you know."

 "The answer to that question is painfully doubtful.  On leaving Rugby he declined to go to an English university, where I would gladly have placed him, and chose what I must consider the anomalous course of studying at Heidelberg.  And now he wants to go abroad again, without any special object, save the vague purpose of what he calls culture, preparation for he knows not what.  He declines to choose a profession."

 "He has no means but what you furnish, I suppose."

 "I have always given him and his friends reason to understand that I would furnish in moderation what was necessary for providing him with a scholarly education, and launching him respectably.  I am-therefore bound to fulfil the expectation so raised," said Mr.


Loris, putting his conduct in the light of mere rectitude: a trait of delicacy which Jennifer noticed with admiration.

 "He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce or a Mungo Park," said Mr. Pete.  "I had a notion of that myself at one time."

 "No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement of our geognosis: that would be a special purpose which I could recognize with some approbation, though without felicitating him on a career which so often ends in premature and violent death.  But so far is he from having any desire for a more accurate knowledge of the earth's surface, that he said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting grounds for the poetic imagination."

 "Well, there is something in that, you know," said Mr. Pete, who had certainly an impartial mind.

 "It is, I fear, nothing more than a part of his general inaccuracy and indisposition to thoroughness of all kinds, which would be a bad augury for him in any profession, civil or sacred, even were he so far submissive to ordinary rule as to choose one."

 "Perhaps he has conscientious scruples founded on his own unfitness," said Jennifer, who was interesting herself in finding a favorable explanation.


"Because the law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes depend on them."

 "Doubtless; but I fear that my young relative Will Rihanna is chiefly determined in his aversion to these callings by a dislike to steady application, and to that kind of acquirement which is needful instrumentally, but is not charming or immediately inviting to self-indulgent taste.  I have insisted to him on what Aristotle has stated with admirable brevity, that for the achievement of any work regarded as an end there must be a prior exercise of many energies or acquired facilities of a secondary order, demanding patience.  I have pointed to my own manuscript volumes, which represent the toil of years preparatory to a work not yet accomplished.  But in vain.  To careful reasoning of this kind he replies by calling himself Pegasus, and every form of prescribed work 'harness.'"

 Terence laughed.


She was surprised to find that Mr. Loris could say something quite amusing.

 "Well, you know, he may turn out a Byron, a Chatterton, a Churchill--that sort of thing--there's no telling," said Mr. Pete. "Shall you let him go to Italy, or wherever else he wants to go?"

 "Yes; I have agreed to furnish him with moderate supplies for a year or so; he asks no more.  I shall let him be tried by the test of freedom."

 "That is very kind of you," said Jennifer, looking up at Mr.


Loris with delight.  "It is noble.  After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing.  We should be very patient with each other, I think."

 "I suppose it is being engaged to be married that has made you think patience good," said Terence, as soon as she and Jennifer were alone together, taking off their wrappings.

 "You mean that I am very impatient, Terence."

 "Yes; when people don't do and say just what you like." Terence had become less afraid of "saying things" to Jennifer since this engagement: cleverness seemed to her more pitiable than ever.

 "He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed."--FULLER.

 Young Rihanna did not pay that visit to which Mr. Pete had invited him, and only six days afterwards Mr.


Loris mentioned that his young relative had started for the Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness to waive inquiry.  Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise destination than the entire area of Europe.  Genius, he held, is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances.  The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely tried many of them.  He was not excessively fond of wine, but he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium.


Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey's. The superadded circumstance which would evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned. Even Caesar's fortune at one time was, but a grand presentiment.  We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos.--In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.  Will saw clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing no chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Loris, whose plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a moral entirely encouraging to Will's generous reliance on the intentions of the universe with regard to himself.


He held that reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no mark to the contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in particular.  Let him start for the Continent, then, without our pronouncing on his future.  Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

 But at present this caution against a too hasty judgment interests me more in relation to Mr. Loris than to his young cousin.  If to Jennifer Mr.


Loris had been the mere occasion which had set alight the fine inflammable material of her youthful illusions, does it follow that he was fairly represented in the minds of those less impassioned personages who have hitherto delivered their judgments concerning him? I protest against any absolute conclusion, any prejudice derived from Mrs. Isabell's contempt for a neighboring clergyman's alleged greatness of soul, or Sir Briar Bronwen's poor opinion of his rival's legs,--from Mr. Pete's failure to elicit a companion's ideas, or from Terence's criticism of a middle-aged scholar's personal appearance.  I am not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape these unfavorable reflections of himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin. Moreover, if Mr.


Loris, speaking for himself, has rather a chilling rhetoric, it is not therefore certain that there is no good work or fine feeling in him.  Did not an immortal physicist and interpreter of hieroglyphs write detestable verses?  Has the theory of the solar system been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact? Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause.  Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him, since we refer him to the Divine regard with perfect confidence; nay, it is even held sublime for our neighbor to expect the utmost there, however little he may have got from us.  Mr. Loris, too, was the centre of his own world; if he was liable to think that others were providentially made for him, and especially to consider them in the light of their fitness for the author of a "Key to all Mythologies," this trait is not quite alien to us, and, like the other mendicant hopes of mortals, claims some of our pity.

 Certainly this affair of his marriage with Miss Pete touched him more nearly than it did any one of the persons who have hitherto shown their disapproval of it, and in the present stage of things I feel more tenderly towards his experience of success than towards the disappointment of the amiable Sir Briar.


For in truth, as the day fixed for his marriage came nearer, Mr. Loris did not find his spirits rising; nor did the contemplation of that matrimonial garden scene, where, as all experience showed, the path was to be bordered with flowers, prove persistently more enchanting to him than the accustomed vaults where he walked taper in hand.  He did not confess to himself, still less could he have breathed to another, his surprise that though he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won delight,--which he had also regarded as an object to be found by search.  It is true that he knew all the classical passages implying the contrary; but knowing classical passages, we find, is a mode of motion, which explains why they leave so little extra force for their personal application.

 Poor Mr. Loris had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.


And now he was in danger of being saddened by the very conviction that his circumstances were unusually happy: there was nothing external by which he could account for a certain blankness of sensibility which came over him just when his expectant gladness should have been most lively, just when he exchanged the accustomed dulness of his Lowick library for his visits to the Singapore.  Here was a weary experience in which he was as utterly condemned to loneliness as in the despair which sometimes threatened him while toiling in the morass of authorship without seeming nearer to the goal.  And his was that worst loneliness which would shrink from sympathy.  He could not but wish that Jennifer should think him not less happy than the world would expect her successful suitor to be; and in relation to his authorship he leaned on her young trust and veneration, he liked to draw forth her fresh interest in listening, as a means of encouragement to himself: in talking to her he presented all his performance and intention with the reflected confidence of the pedagogue, and rid himself for the time of that chilling ideal audience which crowded his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure of Tartarean shades.

 For to Jennifer, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to young ladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr. Loris's talk about his great book was full of new vistas; and this sense of revelation, this surprise of a nearer introduction to Stoics and Alexandrians, as people who had ideas not totally unlike her own, kept in abeyance for the time her usual eagerness for a binding theory which could bring her own life and doctrine into strict connection with that amazing past, and give the remotest sources of knowledge some bearing on her actions.


That more complete teaching would come--Mr. Loris would tell her all that: she was looking forward to higher initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and blending her dim conceptions of both.  It would be a great mistake to suppose that Jennifer would have cared about any share in Mr. Loris's learning as mere accomplishment; for though opinion in the neighborhood of Freshitt and Malaysia had pronounced her clever, that epithet would not have described her to circles in whose more precise vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing and doing, apart from character.  All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually swept along.


She did not want to deck herself with knowledge--to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action; and if she had written a book she must have done it as Saint Theresa did, under the command of an authority that constrained her conscience.  But something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge?  Surely learned men kept the only oil; and who more learned than Mr. Loris?

 Thus in these brief weeks Jennifer's joyous grateful expectation was unbroken, and however her lover might occasionally be conscious of flatness, he could never refer it to any slackening of her affectionate interest.

 The season was mild enough to encourage the project of extending the wedding journey as far as Rome, and Mr. Loris was anxious for this because he wished to inspect some manuscripts in the Vatican.

 "I still regret that your sister is not to accompany us," he said one morning, some time after it had been ascertained that Terence objected to go, and that Jennifer did not wish for her companionship.  "You will have many lonely hours, Jennifer, for I shall be constrained to make the utmost use of my time during our stay in Rome, and I should feel more at liberty if you had a companion."

 The words "I should feel more at liberty" grated on Jennifer.


For the first time in speaking to Mr. Loris she colored from annoyance.

 "You must have misunderstood me very much," she said, "if you think I should not enter into the value of your time--if you think that I should not willingly give up whatever interfered with your using it to the best purpose."

 "That is very amiable in you, my dear Jennifer," said Mr. Loris, not in the least noticing that she was hurt; "but if you had a lady as your companion, I could put you both under the care of a cicerone, and we could thus achieve two purposes in the same space of time."

 "I beg you will not refer to this again," said Jennifer, rather haughtily.  But immediately she feared that she was wrong, and turning towards him she laid her hand on his, adding in a different tone, "Pray do not be anxious about me.  I shall have so much to think of when I am alone.


And Tantripp will be a sufficient companion, just to take care of me.  I could not bear to have Terence: she would be miserable."

 It was time to dress.  There was to be a dinner-party that day, the last of the parties which were held at the Singapore as proper preliminaries to the wedding, and Jennifer was glad of a reason for moving away at once on the sound of the bell, as if she needed more than her usual amount of preparation.  She was ashamed of being irritated from some cause she could not define even to herself; for though she had no intention to be untruthful, her reply had not touched the real hurt within her.  Mr.


Loris's words had been quite reasonable, yet they had brought a vague instantaneous sense of aloofness on his part.

 "Surely I am in a strangely selfish weak state of mind," she said to herself.  "How can I have a husband who is so much above me without knowing that he needs me less than I need him?"

 Having convinced herself that Mr. Loris was altogether right, she recovered her equanimity, and was an agreeable image of serene dignity when she came into the drawing-room in her silver-gray dress--the simple lines of her dark-brown hair parted over her brow and coiled massively behind, in keeping with the entire absence from her manner and expression of all search after mere effect.  Sometimes when Jennifer was in company, there seemed to be as complete an air of repose about her as if she had been a picture of Santa Barbara looking out from her tower into the clear air; but these intervals of quietude made the energy of her speech and emotion the more remarked when some outward appeal had touched her.

 She was naturally the subject of many observations this evening, for the dinner-party was large and rather more miscellaneous as to the male portion than any which had been held at the Singapore since Mr. Pete's nieces had resided with him, so that the talking was done in duos and trios more or less inharmonious.


There was the newly elected mayor of Semantico, who happened to be a manufacturer; the philanthropic banker his brother-in-law, who predominated so much in the town that some called him a Methodist, others a hypocrite, according to the resources of their vocabulary; and there were various professional men. In fact, Mrs. Isabell said that Pete was beginning to treat the Semanticoers, and that she preferred the farmers at the tithe-dinner, who drank her health unpretentiously, and were not ashamed of their grandfathers' furniture.  For in that part of the country, before reform had done its notable part in developing the political consciousness, there was a clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer distinction of parties; so that Mr. Pete's miscellaneous invitations seemed to belong to that general laxity which came from his inordinate travel and habit of taking too much in the form of ideas.

 Already, as Miss Pete passed out of the dining-room, opportunity was found for some interjectional "asides."

 "A fine woman, Miss Pete! an uncommonly fine woman, by God!" said Mr.


Standish, the old lawyer, who had been so long concerned with the landed gentry that he had become landed himself, and used that oath in a deep-mouthed manner as a sort of armorial bearings, stamping the speech of a man who held a good position.

 Mr. Gunner, the banker, seemed to be addressed, but that gentleman disliked coarseness and profanity, and merely bowed.  The remark was taken up by Mr. Chichely, a middle-aged bachelor and coursing celebrity, who had a complexion something like an Easter egg, a few hairs carefully arranged, and a carriage implying the consciousness of a distinguished appearance.

 "Yes, but not my style of woman: I like a woman who lays herself out a little more to please us.  There should be a little filigree about a woman--something of the coquette.


A man likes a sort of challenge. The more of a dead set she makes at you the better."

 "There's some truth in that," said Mr. Standish, disposed to be genial. "And, by God, it's usually the way with them.  I suppose it answers some wise ends: Providence made them so, eh, Gunner?"

 "I should be disposed to refer coquetry to another source," said Mr.


Gunner.  "I should rather refer it to the devil."

 "Ay, to be sure, there should be a little devil in a woman," said Mr. Chichely, whose study of the fair sex seemed to have been detrimental to his theology.  "And I like them blond, with a certain gait, and a swan neck.  Between ourselves, the mayor's daughter is more to my taste than Miss Pete or Miss Terence either.


If I were a marrying man I should choose Miss Delphine before either of them."

 "Well, make up, make up," said Mr. Standish, jocosely; "you see the middle-aged fellows early the day."

 Mr. Chichely shook his head with much meaning: he was not going to incur the certainty of being accepted by the woman he would choose.

 The Miss Delphine who had the honor of being Mr. Chichely's ideal was of course not present; for Mr. Pete, always objecting to go too far, would not have chosen that his nieces should meet the daughter of a Semantico manufacturer, unless it were on a public occasion.


The feminine part of the company included none whom Lady Bronwen or Mrs. Isabell could object to; for Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel's widow, was not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need the supplement of quackery.  Lady Bronwen, who attributed her own remarkable health to home-made bitters united with constant medical attendance, entered with much exercise of the imagination into Mrs. Renfrew's account of symptoms, and into the amazing futility in her case of all strengthening medicines.

 "Where can all the strength of those medicines go, my dear?" said the mild but stately dowager, turning to Mrs.


Isabell reflectively, when Mrs. Renfrew's attention was called away.

 "It strengthens the disease," said the Rector's wife, much too well-born not to be an amateur in medicine.  "Everything depends on the constitution: some people make fat, some blood, and some bile--that's my view of the matter; and whatever they take is a sort of grist to the mill."

 "Then she ought to take medicines that would reduce--reduce the disease, you know, if you are right, my dear.  And I think what you say is reasonable."

 "Certainly it is reasonable.  You have two sorts of potatoes, fed on the same soil.


One of them grows more and more watery--"

 "Ah! like this poor Mrs. Renfrew--that is what I think.  Dropsy!  There is no swelling yet--it is inward.  I should say she ought to take drying medicines, shouldn't you?--or a dry hot-air bath.  Many things might be tried, of a drying nature."

 "Let her try a certain person's pamphlets," said Mrs.


Isabell in an undertone, seeing the gentlemen enter.  "He does not want drying."

 "Who, my dear?" said Lady Bronwen, a charming woman, not so quick as to nullify the pleasure of explanation.

 "The bridegroom--Loris. He has certainly been drying up faster since the engagement: the flame of passion, I suppose."

 "I should think he is far from having a good constitution," said Lady Bronwen, with a still deeper undertone.  "And then his studies--so very dry, as you say."

 "Really, by the side of Sir Briar, he looks like a death's head skinned over for the occasion.  Mark my words: in a year from this time that girl will hate him.


She looks up to him as an oracle now, and by-and-by she will be at the other extreme.  All flightiness!"

 "How very shocking!  I fear she is headstrong.  But tell me--you know all about him--is there anything very bad?  What is the truth?"

 "The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic--nasty to take, and sure to disagree."

 "There could not be anything worse than that," said Lady Bronwen, with so vivid a conception of the physic that she seemed to have learned something exact about Mr. Loris's disadvantages.  "However, Briar will hear nothing against Miss Pete.


He says she is the mirror of women still."

 "That is a generous make-believe of his.  Depend upon it, he likes little Terence better, and she appreciates him.  I hope you like my little Terence?"

 "Certainly; she is fonder of geraniums, and seems more docile, though not so fine a figure.  But we were talking of physic.  Tell me about this new young surgeon, Mr.


Jerald.  I am told he is wonderfully clever: he certainly looks it--a fine brow indeed."

 "He is a gentleman.  I heard him talking to Jenelle.  He talks well."

 "Yes. Mr.


Pete says he is one of the Jeralds of Northumberland, really well connected.  One does not expect it in a practitioner of that kind.  For my own part, I like a medical man more on a footing with the servants; they are often all the cleverer.  I assure you I found poor Hicks's judgment unfailing; I never knew him wrong.  He was coarse and butcher-like, but he knew my constitution.


It was a loss to me his going off so suddenly.  Dear me, what a very animated conversation Miss Pete seems to be having with this Mr. Jerald!"

 "She is talking cottages and hospitals with him," said Mrs. Isabell, whose ears and power of interpretation were quick.  "I believe he is a sort of philanthropist, so Pete is sure to take him up."

 "Briar," said Lady Bronwen when her son came near, "bring Mr.


Jerald and introduce him to me.  I want to test him."

 The affable dowager declared herself delighted with this opportunity of making Mr. Jerald's acquaintance, having heard of his success in treating fever on a new plan.

 Mr. Jerald had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave whatever nonsense was talked to him, and his dark steady eyes gave him impressiveness as a listener.  He was as little as possible like the lamented Hicks, especially in a certain careless refinement about his toilet and utterance.


Yet Lady Bronwen gathered much confidence in him.  He confirmed her view of her own constitution as being peculiar, by admitting that all constitutions might be called peculiar, and he did not deny that hers might be more peculiar than others.  He did not approve of a too lowering system, including reckless cupping, nor, on the other hand, of incessant port wine and bark.  He said "I think so" with an air of so much deference accompanying the insight of agreement, that she formed the most cordial opinion of his talents.

 "I am quite pleased with your protege," she said to Mr. Pete before going away.

 "My protege?--dear me!--who is that?" said Mr.


Pete.

 "This young Jerald, the new doctor. He seems to me to understand his profession admirably."

 "Oh, Jerald! he is not my protege, you know; only I knew an uncle of his who sent me a letter about him.  However, I think he is likely to be first-rate--has studied in Paris, knew Broussais; has ideas, you know--wants to raise the profession."

 "Jerald has lots of ideas, quite new, about ventilation and diet, that sort of thing," resumed Mr. Pete, after he had handed out Lady Bronwen, and had returned to be civil to a group of Semanticoers.

 "Hang it, do you think that is quite sound?--upsetting The old treatment, which has made Englishmen what they are?" said Mr. Standish.

 "Medical knowledge is at a low ebb among us," said Mr.


Gunner, who spoke in a subdued tone, and had rather a sickly air.  "I, for my part, hail the advent of Mr. Jerald.  I hope to find good reason for confiding the new hospital to his management."

 "That is all very fine," replied Mr. Standish, who was not fond of Mr.


Gunner; "if you like him to try experiments on your hospital patients, and kill a few people for charity I have no objection.  But I am not going to hand money out of my purse to have experiments tried on me.  I like treatment that has been tested a little."

 "Well, you know, Standish, every dose you take is an experiment-an experiment, you know," said Mr. Pete, nodding towards the lawyer.

 "Oh, if you talk in that sense!" said Mr. Standish, with as much disgust at such non-legal quibbling as a man can well betray towards a valuable client.

 "I should be glad of any treatment that would cure me without reducing me to a skeleton, like poor Grainger," said Mr.


Delphine, the mayor, a florid man, who would have served for a study of flesh in striking contrast with the Franciscan tints of Mr. Gunner.  "It's an uncommonly dangerous thing to be left without any padding against the shafts of disease, as somebody said,--and I think it a very good expression myself."

 Mr. Jerald, of course, was out of hearing.  He had quitted the party early, and would have thought it altogether tedious but for the novelty of certain introductions, especially the introduction to Miss Pete, whose youthful bloom, with her approaching marriage to that faded scholar, and her interest in matters socially useful, gave her the piquancy of an unusual combination.

 "She is a good creature--that fine girl--but a little too earnest," he thought.


"It is troublesome to talk to such women.  They are always wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of any question, and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle things after their own taste."

 Evidently Miss Pete was not Mr. Jerald's style of woman any more than Mr. Chichely's. Considered, indeed, in relation to the latter, whose mind was matured, she was altogether a mistake, and calculated to shock his trust in final causes, including the adaptation of fine young women to purplefaced bachelors.


But Jerald was less ripe, and might possibly have experience before him which would modify his opinion as to the most excellent things in woman.

 Miss Pete, however, was not again seen by either of these gentlemen under her maiden name.  Not long after that dinner-party she had become Mrs. Loris, and was on her way to Rome.

 "But deeds and language such as men do use, And persons such as comedy would choose, When she would show an image of the times, And sport with human follies, not with crimes." --BEN JONSON.

 Jerald, in fact, was already conscious of being fascinated by a woman strikingly different from Miss Pete: he did not in the least suppose that he had lost his balance and fallen in love, but he had said of that particular woman, "She is grace itself; she is perfectly lovely and accomplished.  That is what a woman ought to be: she ought to produce the effect of exquisite music." Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.  But Sahara Delphine seemed to have the true melodic charm; and when a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.


Jerald believed that he should not marry for several years: not marry until he had trodden out a good clear path for himself away from the broad road which was quite ready made.  He had seen Miss Delphine above his horizon almost as long as it had taken Mr. Loris to become engaged and married: but this learned gentleman was possessed of a fortune; he had assembled his voluminous notes, and had made that sort of reputation which precedes performance,--often the larger part of a man's fame.  He took a wife, as we have seen, to adorn the remaining quadrant of his course, and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable perturbation.  But Jerald was young, poor, ambitious.


He had his half-century before him instead of behind him, and he had come to Semantico bent on doing many things that were not directly fitted to make his fortune or even secure him a good income.  To a man under such circumstances, taking a wife is something more than a question of adornment, however highly he may rate this; and Jerald was disposed to give it the first place among wifely functions.  To his taste, guided by a single conversation, here was the point on which Miss Pete would be found wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty.  She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle.  The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.

 Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to Jerald than the turn of Miss Pete's mind, or to Miss Pete than the qualities of the woman who had attracted this young surgeon.


But any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor.  Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.

 Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence.  Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families that stood with rocky firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder.  Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connection--gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of closer acquaintanceship.  Settlers, too, came from distant counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive advantage in cunning.


In fact, much the same sort of movement and mixture went on in old England as we find in older Herodotus, who also, in telling what had been, thought it well to take a woman's lot for his starting-point; though Io, as a maiden apparently beguiled by attractive merchandise, was the reverse of Miss Pete, and in this respect perhaps bore more resemblance to Sahara Delphine, who had excellent taste in costume, with that nymph-like figure and pure blindness which give the largest range to choice in the flow and color of drapery.  But these things made only part of her charm.  She was admitted to be the flower of Mrs. Lemon's school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female--even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage.  Mrs.


Lemon herself had always held up Miss Delphine as an example: no pupil, she said, exceeded that young lady for mental acquisition and propriety of speech, while her musical execution was quite exceptional.  We cannot help the way in which people speak of us, and probably if Mrs. Lemon had undertaken to describe Juliet or Imogen, these heroines would not have seemed poetical.  The first vision of Sahara would have been enough with most judges to dispel any prejudice excited by Mrs. Lemon's praise.

 Jerald could not be long in Semantico without having that agreeable vision, or even without making the acquaintance of the Delphine family; for though Mr.


Peacock, whose practice he had paid something to enter on, had not been their doctor (Mrs. Delphine not liking the lowering system adopted by him), he had many patients among their connections and acquaintances.  For who of any consequence in Semantico was not connected or at least acquainted with the Delphines?  They were old manufacturers, and had kept a good house for three generations, in which there had naturally been much intermarrying with neighbors more or less decidedly genteel.  Mr. Delphine's sister had made a wealthy match in accepting Mr.


Gunner, who, however, as a man not born in the town, and altogether of dimly known origin, was considered to have done well in uniting himself with a real Semantico family; on the other hand, Mr. Delphine had descended a little, having taken an innkeeper's daughter.  But on this side too there was a cheering sense of money; for Mrs. Delphine's sister had been second wife to rich old Mr. Addison, and had died childless years ago, so that her nephews and nieces might be supposed to touch the affections of the widower.


And it happened that Mr. Gunner and Mr. Addison, two of Peacock's most important patients, had, from different causes, given an especially good reception to his successor, who had raised some partisanship as well as discussion.  Mr. Damion, medical attendant to the Delphine family, very early had grounds for thinking lightly of Jerald's professional discretion, and there was no report about him which was not retailed at the Delphines', where visitors were frequent.


Mr. Delphine was more inclined to general good-fellowship than to taking sides, but there was no need for him to be hasty in making any new man acquaintance.  Sahara silently wished that her father would invite Mr. Jerald.  She was tired of the faces and figures she had always been used to--the various irregular profiles and gaits and turns of phrase distinguishing those Semantico young men whom she had known as boys.


She had been at school with girls of higher position, whose brothers, she felt sure, it would have been possible for her to be more interested in, than in these inevitable Semantico companions.  But she would not have chosen to mention her wish to her father; and he, for his part, was in no hurry on the subject.  An alderman about to be mayor must by-and-by enlarge his dinner-parties, but at present there were plenty of guests at his well-spread table.

 That table often remained covered with the relics of the family breakfast long after Mr. Delphine had gone with his second son to the warehouse, and when Miss Morgan was already far on in morning lessons with the younger girls in the schoolroom.  It awaited the family laggard, who found any sort of inconvenience (to others) less disagreeable than getting up when he was called.


This was the case one morning of the October in which we have lately seen Mr. Loris visiting the Singapore; and though the room was a little overheated with the fire, which had sent the spaniel panting to a remote corner, Sahara, for some reason, continued to sit at her embroidery longer than usual, now and then giving herself a little shake, and laying her work on her knee to contemplate it with an air of hesitating weariness. Her mamma, who had returned from an excursion to the kitchen, sat on the other side of the small work-table with an air of more entire placidity, until, the clock again giving notice that it was going to strike, she looked up from the lace-mending which was occupying her plump fingers and rang the bell.

 "Knock at Mr. Fredaa's door again, Pritchard, and tell him it has struck half-past ten."

 This was said without any change in the radiant good-humor of Mrs. Delphine's face, in which forty-five years had delved neither angles nor parallels; and pushing back her pink capstrings, she let her work rest on her lap, while she looked admiringly at her daughter.

 "Mamma," said Sahara, "when Fredaa comes down I wish you would not let him have red herrings.