“Yes?” the eager woman hastened his lagging mouth.

“Well...hm! a...in that case...a...  Or if a lunatic, you could prove him to have been of unsound mind."...

“Oh! there’s no doubt of his madness on my mind, Brandon.”

“Yes! well! in that case...  Or if of different religious persuasions"...

“She is a Catholic!” Mrs. Doria joyfully interjected.

“Yes! well! in that case...objections might be taken to the form of the marriage...  Might be proved fictitious...  Or if he’s under, say, eighteen years"...

“He can’t be much more,” cried Mrs. Doria.  “I think,” she appeared to reflect, and then faltered imploringly to Adrian, “What is Richard’s age?”

The kind wise youth could not find it in his heart to strike away the phantom straw she caught at.

“Oh! about that, I should fancy,” he muttered; and found it necessary at the same time to duck and turn his head for concealment.  Mrs. Doria surpassed his expectations.

“Yes I well, then...”  Brandon was resuming with a shrug, which was meant to say he still pledged himself to nothing, when Clare’s voice was heard from out the buzzing circle of her cousins:  “Richard is nineteen years and six months old to-day, mama.”

“Nonsense, child.”

“He is, mama.”  Clare’s voice was very steadfast.

“Nonsense, I tell you.  How can you know?”

“Richard is one year and nine months older than me, mama.”

Mrs. Doria fought the fact by years and finally by months.  Clare was too strong for her.

“Singular child!” she mentally apostrophized the girl who scornfully rejected straws while drowning.

“But there’s the religion still!” she comforted herself, and sat down to cogitate.

The men smiled and looked vacuous.

Music was proposed.  There are times when soft music hath not charms; when it is put to as base uses as Imperial Caesar’s dust and is taken to fill horrid pauses.  Angelica Forey thumped the piano, and sang:  “I’m a laughing Gitana, ha-ha! ha-ha!” Matilda Forey and her cousin Mary Branksburne wedded their voices, and songfully incited all young people to Haste to the bower that love has built, and defy the wise ones of the world; but the wise ones of the world were in a majority there, and very few places of assembly will be found where they are not; so the glowing appeal of the British ballad-monger passed into the bosom of the emptiness he addressed.  Clare was asked to entertain the company.  The singular child calmly marched to the instrument, and turned over the appropriate illustrations to the ballad-monger’s repertory.

Clare sang a little Irish air.  Her duty done, she marched from the piano.  Mothers are rarely deceived by their daughters in these matters; but Clare deceived her mother; and Mrs. Doria only persisted in feeling an agony of pity for her child, that she might the more warrantably pity herself—­a not uncommon form of the emotion, for there is no juggler like that heart the ballad-monger puts into our mouths so boldly.  Remember that she saw years of self-denial, years of a ripening scheme, rendered fruitless in a minute, and by the System which had almost reduced her to the condition of constitutional hypocrite.  She had enough of bitterness to brood over, and some excuse for self-pity.