be like a compliment to you on your marriage, you know—and no one must take it for anything more. Mind, no allusion or mention of Roger, and this piece of folly! I shall see the girl then, and I can judge her for myself; for, as you say, that will be the best plan. Osborne will be here too; and he’s always in his element talking to women. I sometimes think he’s half a woman himself, he spends so much money and is so unreasonable.”

The Squire was pleased with his own speech and his own thought, and smiled a little as he finished speaking. Mr. Gibson was both pleased and amused; and he smiled too, anxious as he was to be gone. The next Thursday was soon fixed upon as the day on which Mr. Gibson was to bring his womenkind out to the Hall. He thought that, on the whole, the interview had gone off a good deal better than he expected, and felt rather proud of the invitation of which he was the bearer. Therefore Mrs. Gibson’s manner of receiving it was an annoyance to him. She, meanwhile, had been considering herself as an injured woman, ever since the evening of the day of Roger’s departure; what business had any one had to speak as if the chances of Osborne’s life being prolonged were infinitely small, if in fact the matter was uncertain? She liked Osborne extremely, much better than Roger, and would gladly have schemed to secure him for Cynthia, if she had not shrunk from the notion of her daughter’s becoming a widow. For, if Mrs. Gibson had ever felt anything acutely, it was the death of Mr. Kirkpatrick; and, amiably callous as she was in most things, she recoiled from exposing her daughter wilfully to the same kind of suffering which she herself had experienced. But, if she had only known Dr. Nicholls’ opinion, she would never have favoured Roger’s suit, never. And then Mr. Gibson himself: why was he so cold and reserved in his treatment of her since that night of explanation? She had done nothing wrong; yet she was treated as though she were in disgrace. And everything about the house was flat just now. She even missed the little excitement of Roger’s visits, and the watching of his attentions to Cynthia. Cynthia, too, was silent enough; and, as for Molly, she was absolutely dull and out of spirits—a state of mind so annoying to Mrs. Gibson at present, that she vented some of her discontent upon the poor girl, from whom she feared neither complaint nor repartee.