‘Time you mean.’

‘Yes; time; but I did not mean time.’  Then she smiled as she went on.  ’You must not suppose that I am speaking against my own sex if I say that she will not forget Mr Tregear till someone else has made himself agreeable to her.  We must wait till she can go out a little more into society.  Then she will find out that there are others in the world besides Mr Tregear.  It so often is the case that a girl’s love means her sympathy for him who has chanced to be nearest her.’

The Duke as he went away thought very much of what Lady Cantrip had said to him;—­particularly of those last words.  ’Till some one else has made himself agreeable to her.’  Was he to send his girl into the world in order that she might find a lover?  There was something in the idea which was thoroughly distasteful to him.  He had not given his mind much to the matter, but had felt that a woman should be sought for,—­sought for and extracted, cunningly, as it were, from some hiding-place, and not sent out into a market to be exposed as for sale.  In his own personal history there had been a misfortune,—­a misfortune, the sense of which he could never, at any moment, have expressed to any ears, the memory of which had been always buried deep in his own bosom,—­but a misfortune in that no such cunning extraction on his part had won for him the woman to whose hands had been confided the strings of his heart.  His wife had undergone that process of extraction before he had seen her, and his marriage with her had been a matter of sagacious bargaining.  He was now told that his daughter must be sent out among young men in order that she might become sufficiently fond of some special one to be regardless of Tregear.  There was a feeling that in doing so she must lose something of the freshness of the bloom of her innocence.  How was this transfer of her love to be effected?  Let her go here because she will meet the heir of this wealthy house who may probably be smitten by her charms; or there because that other young lordling would make a fit husband for her.  Let us contrive to throw her into the arms of this man, or put her into the way of that man.  Was his girl to be exposed to this?  Surely that method of bargaining to which he had owed his own wife would be better than that.  Let it be said,—­only he himself most certainly could not be the person to say it,—­let it be said to some man of rank and means and fairly good character, ’Here is a wife for you with so many thousand pounds, with beauty, as you can see for yourself, with rank and belongings of the highest; very good in every respect;—­only that as regards her heart she thinks she has given it to a young man named Tregear.  No marriage there is possible; but perhaps the young lady might suit you?’ It was thus he had been married.  There was an absence in it of that romance which, though he had never experienced it in his own life, was always present to his imagination.  His wife