“To my thinking there is a sweetness about her which I have never seen equalled in any young woman.”  This was said by Lady Ushant to her nephew after Mary had gone to bed on the night before he left.

“One would suppose,” he answered, “that you wanted me to ask her to be my wife.”

“I never want anything of that kind, Reg.  I never make in such matters,—­or mar if I can help it.”

“There is a man at Dillsborough wants to marry her.”

“I can easily believe that there should be two or three.  Who is the man?”

“Do you remember old Twentyman of Chowton?”

“He was our near neighbour.  Of course I remember him.  I can remember well when they bought the land.”

“It is his son.”

“Surely he can hardly be worthy of her, Reg”

“And yet they say he is very worthy.  I have asked about him, and he is not a bad fellow.  He keeps his money and has ideas of living decently.  He doesn’t drink or gamble.  But he’s not a gentleman or anything like one.  I should think he never opens a book.  Of course it would be a degradation.”

“And what does Mary say herself?”

“I fancy she has refused him.”  Then he added after a pause, “Indeed I know she has.”

“How should you know?  Has she told you?” In answer to this he only nodded his head at the old lady.  “There must have been close friendship, Reg, between you two when she told you that.  I hope you have not made her give up one suitor by leading her to love another who does not mean to ask her.”

“I certainly have not done that,” said Reg.  Men may often do much without knowing that they do anything, and such probably had been the case with Reginald Morton during the journey from Dillsborough to Cheltenham.

“What would her father wish?”

“They all want her to take the man.”

“How can she do better?”

“Would you have her marry a man who is not a gentleman, whose wife will never be visited by other ladies; in marrying whom she would go altogether down into another and a lower world?”

This was a matter on which Lady Ushant and her nephew had conversed often, and he thought he knew her to be thoroughly wedded to the privileges which she believed to be attached to her birth.  With him the same feeling was almost the stronger because he was so well aware of the blot upon himself caused by the lowness of his own father’s marriage.  But a man, he held, could raise a woman to his own rank, whereas a woman must accept the level of her husband.

“Bread and meat and chairs and tables are very serious things, Reg.”

“You would then recommend her to take this man, and pass altogether out of your own sphere?”

“What can I do for her?  I am an old woman who will be dead probably before the first five years of her married life have passed over her.  And as for recommending, I do not know enough to recommend anything.  Does she like the man?”