“I can never thank you sufficiently,” said Miss Danvers, “for your kindness in this affair.”

“Indeed but you can very soon thank me much more than sufficiently,” replied her more lively companion, “for there are few things in the world I dislike so much as thanks.  And yet there is one cause of thankfulness you have, and know not of.  Here have I listened to your troubles, as you call them, for more than two hours, and never once told you any of my own.  Troubles! you are, in my estimation, a very happy, enviable girl.”

“Do you think it then so great a happiness to be obliged to take refuge from an absurd selfish stepmother, in order to get by stealth one’s own lawful way?”

“One’s own way is always lawful, my dear.  No tautology.  But you have it—­while I”——­

“Well, what is the matter?”

“Julia, dear—­now do not laugh—­I have a lover that won’t speak.  I have another, or one who calls himself such, who has spoken, or whose wealth, I fear, has spoken, to some purpose—­to my father.”

“And you would open the mouth of the dumb, and stop the mouth of the foolish?”

“Exactly.”

“Who are they?  And first, to proceed by due climax, who is he whose mouth is to be closed?”

“A baronet of these parts, Sir Frederic Beaumantle.  A vain, vain, vain man.  It would be a waste of good words to spend another epithet upon him, for he is all vanity.  All his virtues, all his vices, all his actions, good, bad, and indifferent, are nothing but vanity.  He praises you from vanity, abuses you from vanity, loves and hates you from vanity.  He is vain of his person, of his wealth, of his birth, of his title, vain of all he has, and all he has not.  He sets so great a value on his innumerable and superlative good qualities, that he really has not been able (until he met with your humble servant) to find any individual of our sex on whom he could, conscientiously, bestow so great a treasure as his own right hand must inevitably give away.  This has been the only reason—­he tells me so himself—­why he has remained so long unmarried; for he has rounded the arch, and is going down the bridge.  To take his own account of this delicate matter, he is fluctuating, with an uneasy motion, to and fro, between forty and forty-five.”

“Old enough, I doubt not, to be your father.  How can he venture on such a frolicsome young thing as you?”

“I asked him that question myself one day; and he told me, with a most complacent smile, that I should be the perfect compendium of matrimony—­he should have wife and child in one.”

“The old coxcomb!  And yet there was a sort of providence in that.—­Now, who is he whose mouth is to be opened?”

“Oh—­he!—­can’t you guess?”

“Your cousin Reginald, as you used to call him—­though cousin I believe he is none—­this learned wrangler?”

“The same.  Trust me, he loves me to the bottom of his heart; but because his little cousin is a great heiress, he thinks it fit to be very proud, and gives me over—­many thanks to him—­to this rich baronet.  But here he comes.”