“She is a very pretty, good little country-girl. I don’t mean to say anything against her, but”—

“Remember the Charity Ball; you called her ‘unusually intelligent,’ after you had danced with her there. But, after all, we’re like the genie and the fairy in the ‘Arabian Nights’ Entertainment,’ who each cried up the merits of the Prince Caramalzaman and the Princess Badoura.”

“Hamley is not a marrying man.”

“How do you know?”

“I know that he has very little private fortune, and I know that science is not a remunerative profession, if profession it can be called.”

“Oh, if that’s all—a hundred things may happen—some one may leave him a fortune—or this tiresome little heir, that nobody wanted, may die.”

“Hush, Harriet, that’s the worst of allowing yourself to plan far ahead for the future; you are sure to contemplate the death of some one, and to reckon upon the contingency as affecting events.”

“As if lawyers were not always doing something of the kind!”

“Leave it to those to whom it is necessary. I dislike planning marriages, or looking forward to deaths, about equally.”

“You are getting very prosaic and tiresome, Hollingford!”

“Only getting!” said he, smiling; “I thought you had always looked upon me as a tiresome, matter-of-fact fellow.”

“Now, if you’re going to fish for a compliment, I am gone. Only remember my prophecy, when my vision comes to pass; or make a bet, and whoever wins shall spend the money on a present to Prince Caramalzaman or Princess Badoura, as the case may be.”

Lord Hollingford remembered his sister’s words, as he heard Roger say to Molly, when he was leaving the Towers on the following day—

“Then I may tell my father that you will come and pay him a visit next week? You don’t know what pleasure it will give him.” He had been on the point of saying “will give us”; but he had an instinct which told him it was as well to consider Molly’s promised visit as exclusively made to his father.

The next day Molly went home; she was astonished at herself for being so sorry to leave the Towers, and found it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the long-fixed idea of the house, as a place wherein to suffer all a child’s tortures of dismay and forlornness, with her new and fresh conception. She had gained health; she had had pleasure; the faint fragrance of a new and unacknowledged hope had stolen into her life. No wonder that Mr. Gibson was struck with the improvement in her looks, and Mrs. Gibson impressed with her increased grace.

“Ah, Molly,” said she, “it’s really wonderful to see what a little good society will do for a girl. Even a week of association with such people as one meets with at the Towers is, as somebody said of a lady of rank whose name I have forgotten, ‘a polite education in itself.’ There is something quite different about you—a je ne sçais quoi—that would tell me at once that you have been mingling with the aristocracy. With all her charms, it was what my darling Cynthia wanted; not that Mr. Henderson thought so, for a more devoted lover can hardly be conceived. He absolutely bought her a parure of diamonds. I was obliged to say to him that I had studied to preserve her simplicity of taste, and that he must not corrupt her with too much luxury. But I was rather disappointed at their going off without a maid. It was the one blemish in the arrangements—the spot on the sun. Dear Cynthia! when I think of her, I do assure you, Molly, I