It seemed to her that Mr Glascock was quite conscious of the advantages of his own position, and that his powers of talking about other matters than those with which he was immediately connected were limited.  She did believe that he had in truth paid her the compliment of falling in love with her, and this is a compliment to which few girls are indifferent.  Nora might perhaps have tried to fall in love with Mr Glascock, had she not been forced to make comparisons between him and another.  This other one had not fallen in love with her, as she well knew; and she certainly had not fallen in love with him.  But still the comparison was forced upon her, and it did not result in favour of Mr Glascock.  On the present occasion Mr Glascock as he sat next to her almost proposed to her.

‘You have never seen Monkhams?’ he said.  Monkhams was his father’s seat, a very grand place in Worcestershire.  Of course he knew very well that she had never seen Monkhams.  How should she have seen it?

‘I have never been in that part of England at all,’ she replied.

’I should so like to show you Monkhams.  The oaks there are the finest in the kingdom.  Do you like oaks?’

’Who does not like oaks?  But we have none in the islands, and nobody has ever seen so few as I have.’

’I’ll show you Monkhams some day.  Shall I?  Indeed I hope that some day I may really show you Monkhams.’

Now when an unmarried man talks to a young lady of really showing her the house in which it will be his destiny to live, he can hardly mean other than to invite her to live there with him.  It must at least be his purpose to signify that, if duly encouraged, he will so invite her.  But Nora Rowley did not give Mr Glascock much encouragement on this occasion.

’I’m afraid it is not likely that anything will ever take me into that part of the country,’ she said.  There was something perhaps in her tone which checked Mr Glascock, so that he did not then press the invitation.

When the ladies were upstairs in the drawing-room, Lady Milborough contrived to seat herself on a couch intended for two persons only, close to Mrs Trevelyan.  Emily, thinking that she might perhaps hear some advice about Guinness’s stout, prepared herself to be saucy.  But the matter in hand was graver than that.  Lady Milborough’s mind was uneasy about Colonel Osborne.

‘My dear,’ said she, ’was not your father very intimate with that Colonel Osborne?’

‘He is very intimate with him, Lady Milborough.’

’Ah, yes; I thought I had heard so.  That makes it of course natural that you should know him.’

‘We have known him all our lives,’ said Emily, forgetting probably that out of the twenty-three years and some months which she had hitherto lived, there had been a consecutive period of more than twenty years in which she had never seen this man whom she had known all her life.

’That makes a difference, of course; and I don’t mean to say anything against him.’