“I am sure, Mr. Saul, that it is quite impossible.”

“In what way impossible?”

“Papa would not allow it.”

“Have you asked him?”

“Oh, dear, no.”

“Or Mrs. Clavering?”

Fanny blushed as she remembered how she had permitted the days to go by without asking her mother’s counsel.  “No; I have spoken to no one.  Why should I, when I knew that it is impossible?”

“May I speak to Mr. Clavering?” To this Fanny made no immediate answer, and then Mr. Saul urged the question again.  “May I speak to your father?”

Fanny felt that she was assenting, even in that she did not answer such a question by an immediate refusal of her permission; and yet she did not mean to assent.  “Miss Clavering,” he said, “if you regard me with affection, you have no right to refuse me this request.  I tell you so boldly.  If you feel for me that love which would enable you to accept me as your husband, it is your duty to tell me so—­your duty to me, to yourself and to your God.”

Fanny did not quite see the thing in this light, and yet she did not wish to contradict him.  At this moment she forgot that in order to put herself on perfectly firm ground, she should have gone back to the first hypothesis, and assured him that she did not feel any such regard for him.  Mr. Saul, whose intellect was more acute, took advantage of her here, and chose to believe that that matter of her affection was now conceded to him.  He knew what he was doing well, and is open to a charge of some jesuitry.  “Mr. Saul,” said Fanny, with grave prudence, “it cannot be right for people to marry when they have nothing to live upon.”  When she had shown him so plainly that she had no other piece left on the board to play than this, the game may be said to have been won on his side.

“If that be your sole objection,” said he, “you cannot but think it right that I and your father should discuss it.”  To this she made no reply whatever, and they walked along the lane for a considerable way in silence.  Mr. Saul would have been glad to have had the interview over now, feeling that at any future meeting he would have stronger power of assuming the position of an accepted lover than he would do now.  Another man would have desired to get from her lips a decided word of love—­to take her hand, perhaps, and to feel some response from it—­to go further than this, as is not unlikely, and plead for the happy indulgences of an accepted lover.  But Mr. Saul abstained, and was wise in abstaining.  She had not so far committed herself but that she might even now have drawn back, had he pressed her too hard.  For hand-pressing, and the titillations of love-making, Mr. Saul was not adapted; but he was a man who, having once loved, would love on to the end.