Miss Bennett turned red and pale; the offensive tone sank into one pitifully weak and cringing.

“Oh, Mrs. Grey! don’t be hard upon me; I’m a poor governess, doing my best, and father has a large family of us, and the shop isn’t as thriving as it was.  Don’t turn me away, and I’ll never meet the young fellow again.”

There was a little natural feeling visible through the ultra-humility of the girl’s manner, and when she took out a coarse but elaborately laced pocket-handkerchief, and wept upon it abundantly, Christian’s heart melted.

“I am very sorry for you—­very sorry indeed; but what can I do?  Will you tell me candidly, are you engaged to this gentleman?”

“No, not exactly; but I am sure I shall be by-and-by.”

“He is your lover, then? he ought to be, if, as Letitia says, you go walking together every evening.”

“Well, and if I do, it’s nobody’s business but my own, I suppose; and it’s very hard it should lose me my situation.”

So it was.  Mrs. Grey remembered her own “young days,” as she now called them—­remembered them with pity rather than shame; for she had done nothing wrong.  She had deceived no one, only been herself deceived—­in a very harmless fashion, just because, in her foolish, innocent heart, which knew nothing of the world and the world’s wiles, she thought no man would ever be so mean, so cowardly, as to tell a girl he loved her unless he meant it in the true, noble, knightly way—­a lover

    “Who loved one woman, and who clave to her”

—­clave once and forever.  A vague tenderness hung about those days yet, enough to make her cast the halo of her sympathy over even commonplace Susan Bennett.

“Will you give me your confidence?  Who is this friend of yours, and why does he not at once ask you for his wife?  Perhaps he is poor and can not afford to marry?”

“Oh. dear me!  I’m not so stupid as to think of a poor man, Bless you! he has a title and an estate too.  If I get him I shall make a splendid marriage.”

Christian recoiled.  Her sympathy was altogether thrown away.  There evidently was not a point in common between foolish Christian Oakley, taking dreamy twilight saunters under the apple-trees—­not alone; looking up to her companion as something between Sir Launcelot and the Angel Gabriel—­and this girl, carrying on a clandestine flirtation, which she hoped would—­and was determined to make—­end in a marriage, with a young man much above her own station, and just because he was so.  As for loving him in the sense that Christian had understood love, Miss Bennett was utterly incapable of it.  She never thought of love at all—­only of matrimony.

Still, the facts of the case boded ill.  A wealthy young nobleman, and a pretty, but coarse and half-educated shopkeeper’s daughter—­no good could come of the acquaintance—­perhaps fatal harm.  Once more Christian thought she would try to conquer her disgust, and win the girl to better things.