But it gratified him to think that she had chosen him for the repository of her tale; that she had told her terrible history to him.  I fear that some small part of this gratification was owing to her rank and wealth.  To be the one friend of a widowed countess, young, rich, and beautiful, was something much out of the common way.  Such confidence lifted him far above the Wallikers of the world.  That he was pleased to be so trusted by one that was beautiful, was, I think, no disgrace to him; although I bear in mind his condition as a man engaged.  It might be dangerous, but that danger in such case it would be his duty to overcome.  But in order that it might be overcome, it would certainly be well that she should know his position.

I fear he speculated as he went along as to what might have been his condition in the world had he never seen Florence Burton.  First he asked himself, whether, under any circumstances, he would have wished to marry a widow, and especially a widow by whom he had already been jilted.  Yes; he thought that he could have forgiven her even that, if his own heart had not changed; but he did not forget to tell himself again how lucky it was for him that his heart was changed.  What countess in the world, let her have what park she might, and any imaginable number of thousands a year, could be so sweet, so nice, so good, so fitting for him as his own Florence Burton?  Then he endeavored to reflect what happened when a commoner married the widow of a peer.  She was still called, he believed, by her own title, unless she should choose to abandon it.  Any such arrangement was now out of the question; but he thought that he would prefer that she should have been called Mrs. Clavering, if such a state of things had come about.  I do not know that he pictured to himself any necessity—­either on her part or on his, of abandoning anything else that came to her from her late husband.

At half-past six, the time named by Theodore Burton, he found himself at the door in Onslow Crescent, and was at once shown up into the drawing-room.  He knew that Mr. Burton had a family, and he had pictured to himself an untidy, ugly house, with an untidy, motherly woman going about with a baby in her arms.  Such would naturally be the home of a man who dusted his shoes with his pocket-handkerchief.  But to his surprise he found himself in as pretty a drawing-room as he remembered to have seen; and seated on a sofa, was almost as pretty a woman as he remembered.  She was tall and slight, with large brown eyes and well-defined eyebrows, with an oval face, and the sweetest, kindest mouth that ever graced a woman.  Her dark brown hair was quite plain, having been brushed simply smooth across the forehead, and then collected in a knot behind.  Close beside her, on a low chair, sat a little fair-haired girl, about seven years old, who was going through some pretence at needlework; and kneeling on a higher chair, while she sprawled over the drawing-room table, was another girl, some three years younger, who was engaged with a puzzle-box.