Could it be a wedding?  Could Miss Selina really love, and be intending to marry, that horrid little man?  For strange to say, this young servant had, what many a young beauty of rank and fashion has not, or has lost forever—­the true, pure, womanly creed, that loving and marrying are synonymous terms; that to let a man put his arm round your waist when you do not intend to marry him, or to intend to marry him for money or any thing else when you do not really love him, are things quite impossible and incredible to any womanly mind.  A creed somewhat out of date, and perhaps existing only in stray nooks of the world; but thank God! it does exist.  Hilary had it, and she had taught it to Elizabeth.

“I wonder whether Miss Hilary knows of this?  I wonder what she would say to it?”

And now arose the perplexing ethical question aforesaid, as to whether Elizabeth ought to tell her.

It was one of Miss Hilary’s doctrines—­the same for the kitchen as for the parlor, nay, preached strongest in the kitchen, where the mysteries of the parlor are often so cruelly exposed—­that a secret accidentally found out should be kept as sacred as if actually confided; also, that the secret of an enemy should no more be betrayed than that of a beloved and trusting friend.

“Miss Selina isn’t my enemy,” smiled Elizabeth:  “but I’m not overfond of her, and so I’d rather not tell of her, or vex her if I can help it.  Any how, I’ll keep it to myself for a bit.”

But the secret weighed heavily upon her, and besides, her honest heart felt a certain diminution of respect for Miss Selina.  What could she see to like in that common looking, commonplace man, whom she could not have met a dozen times, of whose domestic life she knew nothing, and whose personality Elizabeth, with the sharp observation often found in her class, probably because coarse people do not care to hide their coarseness from servants, had speedily set down at her own valuation—­

“Neither carriage nor horses, nor nothing, will ever make him a gentleman?”

He, however, sent Miss Selina home magnificently in the said carriage; Ascott with her, who had been picked up somewhere in the City and who came in to his dinner, without the slightest reference to going “out of town.”

But in spite of her Lord Mayor’s Show, and the great attention which she said she had received from “various members of the Common Council of the City of London,” Miss Selina was, for her, meditative, and did not talk quite so much as usual.  There was in the little parlor an uncomfortable atmosphere, as if all of them had something on their minds.  Hilary felt the ice must be broken, and if she did not do it nobody else would.  So she said, stealing her hand into Johanna’s under shelter of the dim fire-light, “Selina, I wanted to have a little family consultation.  I have just received an offer.”

“An offer!” repeated Miss Selina, with a visible start.  “Oh, I forgot; you went to see your friend, Miss Balquidder, this morning.  Did you get any thing out of her?  Has she any nephews and nieces wanting a governess?”