“Oh, my dear!”

“It should be very moderate, you know.”

“But then, suppose it wasn’t moderate.  I don’t like to see engaged young men going on in that way.  I suppose I’m very old fashioned; but I think when a young man is engaged, he ought to remember it and to show it.  It ought to make him a little serious, and he shouldn’t be going about like a butterfly, that may do just as it pleases in the sunshine.”

During the three months which Harry remained in town before the Easter holidays he wrote more than once to Florence, pressing her to name an early day for their marriage.  These letters were written, I think, after certain evenings spent under favorable circumstances in Onslow Crescent, when he was full of the merits of domestic comfort, and perhaps also owed some of their inspiration to the fact that Lady Ongar had left London without seeing him.  He had called repeatedly in Bolton Street, having been specially pressed to do so by Lady Ongar, but he had only once found her at home, and then a third person had been present.  This third person had been a lady who was not introduced to him, but he had learned from her speech that she was a foreigner.  On that occasion Lady Ongar had made herself gracious and pleasant, but nothing had passed which interested him, and, most unreasonably, he had felt himself to be provoked.  When next he went to Bolton Street he found that Lady Ongar had left London.  She had gone down to Ongar Park, and, as far as the woman at the house knew, intended to remain there till after Easter.  Harry had some undefined idea that she should not have taken such a step without telling him.  Had she not declared to him that he was her only friend?  When a friend is going out of town, leaving an only friend behind, that friend ought to tell her only friend what she is going to do, otherwise such a declaration of only-friendship means nothing.  Such was Harry Clavering’s reasoning, and having so reasoned, he declared to himself that it did mean nothing, and was very pressing to Florence Burton to name an early day.  He had been with Cecilia, he told her—­he had learned to call Mrs. Burton Cecilia in his letters—­and she quite agreed with him that their income would be enough.  He was to have two hundred a year from his father, having brought himself to abandon that high-toned resolve which he had made some time since, that he would never draw any part of his income from the parental coffers.  His father had again offered it, and he had accepted it.  Old Mr. Burton was to add a hundred, and Harry was of opinion that they could do very well.  Cecilia thought the same, he said, and therefore Florence surely would not refuse.  But Florence received, direct from Onslow Crescent Cecilia’s own version of her thoughts, and did refuse.  It may be surmised that she would have refused even without assistance from Cecilia, for she was a young lady not of a fickle or changing disposition.  So she wrote to Harry with much care, and as her letter had some influence on the story to be told, the reader shall read it—­if the reader so pleases.