Lucy stood for a few moments before the sense reached her mind, then she dropped into a chair, and exclaimed,

’I see how it is!  You’ll treat him as grandpapa treated Captain Pringle, but I shall break my heart, quite!’ and she burst into tears.

’My dear, your father and I will do our best for your happiness, and we would never use concealment.  Whatever we do shall be as Christian people working together, not as tyrants with a silly girl.’

Lucy was pleased, and let Albinia take her hand.

’Then I will write to decline the horse.  It would be far too marked.’

‘But oh, mamma! you wont keep him away!’

’I shall not alter our habits unless I see cause.  He is much too young for us to think seriously of what he may have said; and I entreat you to put it out of your mind, for it would be very sad for you to fix your thoughts on him, and then find him not in earnest, and even if he were, you know it would be wrong to let affection grow up where there is no real dependence upon a person’s goodness.’

The kindness soothed Lucy, and though she shed some tears, she did not resist the decision.  Indeed she was sensible of that calm determination of manner, which all the family had learnt to mean that the measures thus taken were unalterable, whereas the impetuous impulses often were reversed.

Many a woman’s will is like the tide, ever fretting at the verge of the boundary, but afraid to overpass it, and only tempting the utmost limit in the certainty of the recall, and Lucy perhaps felt a kind of protection in the curb, even while she treated it as an injury.  She liked to be the object of solicitude, and was pleased with Albinia’s extra kindness, while, perhaps, there was some excitement in the belief that Algernon was missing her, so she was particularly amenable, and not much out of spirits.

The original Meadows character, and Bayford breeding, had for a time been surmounted by Albinia’s influence and training; but so ingrain was the old disposition, that a touch would at once re-awaken it, and the poor girl was in a neutral state, coloured by whichever impression had been most recent.  Albinia’s hopes of prevailing in the end increased when Mrs. Dusautoy told her, with a look of intelligence, that Algernon was going to stay with a connexion of his mother, a Mr. Greenaway, with six daughters, very stylish young ladies.

Six stylish young ladies!  Albinia could have embraced them all, and actually conferred a cordial nod on Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy when she met him on the way home.

But as she entered the house, so ominous a tone summoned her to the library, that she needed not to be told that Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy had been there.

‘I told him,’ said Mr. Kendal, ’that he was too young for me to entertain his proposal, and I intimated that he had character to redeem before presenting himself in such capacity.’