’Well, if you think that they will consider we have acted uprightly by them, let it be Michaelmas with all my heart.  What does Lady Cumnor say?’

’Oh!  I told her I was afraid you wouldn’t like waiting, because of your difficulties with your servants, and because of Molly—­it would be so desirable to enter on the new relationship with her as soon as possible.’

’To be sure; so it would.  Poor child!  I’m afraid the intelligence of my engagement has rather startled her.’

‘Cynthia will feel it deeply, too,’ said Mrs. Kirkpatrick, unwilling to let her daughter be behind Mr. Gibson’s in sensibility and affection.

’We will have her over to the wedding!  She and Molly shall be bridesmaids,’ said Mr. Gibson, in the unguarded warmth of his heart.

This plan did not quite suit Mrs. Kirkpatrick; but she thought it best not to oppose it, until she had a presentable excuse to give, and perhaps also some reason would naturally arise out of future circumstances; so at this time she only smiled, and softly pressed the hand she held in hers.

It is a question whether Mrs. Kirkpatrick or Molly wished the most for the day to be over which they were to spend together at the Towers.  Mrs. Kirkpatrick was rather weary of girls as a class.  All the trials of her life were connected with girls in some way.  She was very young when she first became a governess, and had been worsted in her struggles with her pupils, in the first place she ever went to.  Her elegance of appearance and manner, and her accomplishments, more than her character and acquirements, had rendered it more easy for her than for most to obtain good ‘situations;’ and she had been absolutely petted in some; but still she was constantly encountering naughty or stubborn, or over-conscientious, or severe-judging, or curious and observant girls.  And again, before Cynthia was born, she had longed for a boy, thinking it possible that if some three or four intervening relations died, he might come to be a baronet; and instead of a son, lo and behold it was a daughter!  Nevertheless, with all her dislike to girls in the abstract as ‘the plagues of her life’ (and her aversion was not diminished by the fact of her having kept a school for ’young ladies’ at Ashcombe), she really meant to be as kind as she could be to her new step-daughter, whom she remembered principally as a black-haired, sleepy child, in whose eyes she had read admiration of herself.  Mrs. Kirkpatrick accepted Mr. Gibson principally because she was tired of the struggle of earning her own livelihood; but she liked him personally—­nay, she even loved him in her torpid way, and she intended to be good to his daughter, though she felt as if it would have been easier for her to have been good to his son.

Molly was bracing herself up in her way too.  ’I will be like Harriet.  I will think of others.  I won’t think of myself,’ she kept repeating all the way to the Towers.  But there was no selfishness in wishing that the day was come to an end, and that she did very heartily.  Mrs. Hamley sent her thither in the carriage, which was to wait and bring her back at night.  Mrs. Hamley wanted Molly to make a favourable impression, and she sent for her to come and show herself before she set out.