“Oh, my son!” she protested, “I am sure you have always been most correct.”

“I have tried to be,” he said simply.  “If I have said nothing to you, it has been because I wished to be cautious, not to commit myself, to be very sure——­”

“Of the lady’s affection, do you mean?”

“Ah, can one ever be sure of that?  No; I mean rather of my own attitude, of my own situation.  It has always seemed to me that marriage is a very great undertaking, a thing to be immensely considered, not to be embarked on rashly.”

“You view everything so justly!” she exclaimed.  “Have you—­am I to understand that you have a particular person in view?”

He waved aside the compliment with a bland gesture, which asserted that only his magnanimity prevented him from acknowledging its truth.

“Surely, surely!” he said.  “You are perhaps aware how immensely I admire Miss Masters; that I have paid her very great attention—­marked attention, I may say?”

“I observed something of the kind at Lucerne.  I did not know if it had continued; sometimes I thought so.  Have you proposed to her?”

“No,” he said slowly; “I have not yet proposed to her.  Naturally, I wished to consult you first.”

“I am sure, Charles,” said his mother cheerfully, “that I shall be extremely pleased.  She is a very nice girl.  She is a great-niece of Lord Hazelbury, and connected with the Marshes, and I know she will have at least sixty thousand pounds.”

He glanced across at her, frowning a little, with a certain irritation.

“I shall not marry her for her money,” he said.

“My dear boy,” she retaliated, “I did not suppose you would be mercenary; only, a little money is very desirable; and Lady Garnett has a great deal, and Mary will certainly get her share of it.”

“Ah, I don’t like her,” put in Charles inconsequently; “she is a profane old woman.”

“Neither do I; but one must accept her.  And Mary, after all, is only her niece.”

“She has a beautiful character,” he continued slowly. (This time he was not speaking of Lady Garnett.) “I admire it more than I can say; it has very great depths.”

His mother looked up at him quickly, struck by his strenuous accent, for which she was scarcely prepared.  She had a high notion of his character, of his ability, and was pleased, more pleased than she cared to admit, at the suitability of the match.  He had always been an excellent, even a sympathetic son; and it had been part of his excellence that whenever he should marry, she had been quite certain that he would marry like this, selecting with dignity a young woman whom one could emphatically approve—­a testimony to his constancy in certain definite traditions in which he had been reared, traditions, it may be said, which he adhered to with a tenacity that even exceeded her own.

It had never entered into her calculations, however, to look upon him as an ardent lover, and yet it was as an ardent lover that he had just spoken.  She recognised the tone.