‘Pray don’t say a word about it, Aunt Stanbury.’

‘It is those odious girls.  He’s there now every day.’

‘Why shouldn’t he go there, Aunt Stanbury?’

’If he’s fool enough, let him go.  I don’t care where he goes.  But I do care about these lies.  They wouldn’t dare to say it only they think my mouth is closed.  They’ve no honour themselves, but they screen themselves behind mine.’

‘I’m sure they won’t find themselves mistaken in what they trust to,’ said Dorothy, with a spirit that her aunt had not expected from her.  Miss Stanbury at this time had told nobody that the offer to her niece had been made and repeated and finally rejected, but she found it very difficult to hold her tongue.

In the meantime Mr Gibson spent a good deal of his time at Heavitree.  It should not perhaps be asserted broadly that he had made up his mind that marriage would be good for him; but he had made up his mind, at least, to this, that it was no longer to be postponed without a balance of disadvantage.  The Charybdis in the Close drove him helpless into the whirlpool of the Heavitree Scylla.  He had no longer an escape from the perils of the latter shore.  He had been so mauled by the opposite waves, that he had neither spirit nor skill left to him to keep in the middle track.  He was almost daily at Heavitree, and did not attempt to conceal from himself the approach of his doom.

But still there were two of them.  He knew that he must become a prey, but was there any choice left to him as to which siren should have him?  He had been quite aware in his more gallant days, before he had been knocked about on that Charybdis rock, that he might sip, and taste, and choose between the sweets.  He had come to think lately that the younger young lady was the sweeter.  Eight years ago indeed the passages between him and the elder had been tender; but Camilla had then been simply a romping girl, hardly more than a year or two beyond her teens.  Now, with her matured charms, Camilla was certainly the more engaging, as far as outward form went.  Arabella’s cheeks were thin and long, and her front teeth had come to show themselves.  Her eyes were no doubt still bright, and what she had of hair was soft and dark.  But it was very thin in front, and what there was of supplemental mass behind the bandbox by which Miss Stanbury was so much aggrieved was worn with an indifference to the lines of beauty, which Mr Gibson himself found to be very depressing.  A man with a fair burden on his back is not a grievous sight; but when we see a small human being attached to a bale of goods which he can hardly manage to move, we feel that the poor fellow has been cruelly over-weighted.  Mr Gibson certainly had that sensation about Arabella’s chignon.  And as he regarded it in a nearer and a dearer light as a chignon that might possibly become his own, as a burden which in one sense he might himself be called upon to bear, as a domestic utensil of which