“A girl ought to be proud of her husband.”

“Your niece ought not to be proud of marrying a groom.  But she angered me, and so did my aunt,—­though I pitied her.  Then I reflected that they could get nothing from me in my anger,—­not even a promise of a good word.  So I sent her to you.  It was, at any rate, the best thing I could do for them.”  Mr. Grey thought that it was.

CHAPTER XXXV.

MR. BARRY AND MR. JUNIPER.

The joy in Bolsover Terrace was intense when Mrs. Carroll returned home.  “We are all to have three hundred and fifty pound fortunes when we get husbands!” said Georgina, anticipating at once the pleasures of matrimony.

“I am to have four hundred and fifty,” said Amelia.  “I do think he might have made it five hundred pounds.  If I had it to give away, I never would show the cloven foot about the last fifty pounds!”

“But he’s only to have four hundred pounds,” said Sophia.  “Your things are to be bought with the other fifty pounds.”

“I never can do it for fifty pounds,” said Amelia.  “I did not expect that I was to find my own trousseau out of my own fortune.”

“Girls, how can you be so ungrateful?” said their mother.

“I’m not ungrateful, mamma,” said Potsey.  “I shall be very much obliged when I get my three hundred and fifty pounds.  How long will it be?”

“You’ve got to find the young man first, Potsey.  I don’t think you’ll ever do that,” said Georgina, who was rather proud of her own good looks.

This took place on the evening of the day on which Mrs. Carroll had gone to London, where Mr. Carroll was about attending to some of those duties of conviviality in the performance of which he was so indefatigable.  On the following morning at twelve o’clock he was still in bed.  It was a well-known fact in the family that on such an occasion he would lie in bed, and that before twelve o’clock he would have managed to extract from his wife’s little hoardings at any rate two bottles of soda-water and two glasses of some alcoholic mixture which was generally called brandy.  “I’ll have a gin-and-potash, Sophie,” he had said on this occasion, with reference to the second dose, “and do make haste.  I wish you’d go yourself, because that girl always drinks some of the sperrits.”

“What! go to the gin-shop?”

“It’s a most respectable publican’s,—­just round the corner.”

“Indeed, I shall do nothing of the kind.  You’ve no feeling about your daughters at all!” But Sophie went on her errand, and in order to protect her father’s small modicum of “sperrits” she slipped on her cloak and walked out so as to be able to watch the girl.  Still, I think that the maiden managed to get a sip as she left the bar.  The father, in the mean-time with his head between his hands, was ruminating on the “cocked-up way which girls have who can’t do a turn for their father.”