“Your aunt was kind enough to ask me for so long.”

“I shall go back on Saturday.  If I were to stay longer I should feel myself to be in her way.  And I have come to live a sort of hermit’s life.  I hardly know how to sit down and eat my dinner in company, and have no idea of seeing a human being before two o’clock.”

“What do you do with yourself?”

“I rush in and out of the garden and spend my time between my books and my flowers and my tobacco pipes.”

“Do you mean to live always like that?” she asked, in perfect innocency.

“I think so.  Sometimes I doubt whether it’s wise.”

“I don’t think it wise at all,” said Mary.

“Why not?”

“People should live together, I think.”

“You mean that I ought to have a wife?”

“No;—­I didn’t mean that.  Of course that must be just as you might come to like any one well enough.  But a person need not shut himself up and be a hermit because he is not married.  Lord Rufford is not married and he goes everywhere.”

“He has money and property and is a man of pleasure.”

“And your cousin, Mr. John Morton.”

“He is essentially a man of business, which I never could have been.  And they say he is going to be married to that Miss Trefoil who has been staying there.  Unfortunately I have never had anything that I need do in all my life, and therefore I have shut myself up as you call it.  I wonder what your life will be.”  Mary blushed and said nothing.  “If there were anything to tell I wish I knew it”

“There is nothing to tell.”

“Nothing?”

She thought a moment before she answered him and then she said, “Nothing.  What should I have to tell?” she added trying to laugh.

He remained for a few minutes silent, and then put his head out towards her as he spoke.  “I was afraid that you might have to tell that you were engaged to marry Mr. Twentyman.”

“I am not”

“Oh!—­I am so glad to hear it”

“I don’t know why you should be glad.  If I had said I was, it would have been very uncivil if you hadn’t declared yourself glad to hear that”

“Then I must have been uncivil for I couldn’t have done it.  Knowing how my aunt loves you, knowing what she thinks of you and what she would think of such a match, remembering myself what I do of you, I could not have congratulated you on your engagement to a man whom I think so much inferior to yourself in every respect.  Now you know it all,—­why I was angry at the bridge, why I was hardly civil to you at your father’s house; and, to tell the truth, why I have been so anxious to be alone with you for half an hour.  If you think it an offence that I should take so much interest in you, I will beg your pardon for that also.”

“Oh, no!”

“I have never spoken to my aunt about it, but I do not think that she would have been contented to hear that you were to become the wife of Mr. Twentyman.”