“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. Cadwallader say what she will.  He is pretty certain to be a bishop, is Casaubon.  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. Brooke 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. Brooke 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.

CHAPTER VIII.

    “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 James Chettam how well he continued to like going to the Grange after he had once encountered the difficulty of seeing Dorothea 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. Casaubon; he was only shocked that Dorothea was under a melancholy illusion, and his mortification lost some of its bitterness by being mingled with compassion.

Nevertheless, while Sir James 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. Casaubon.  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