"Love in a cottage" is a time-honoured phrase, which changes its significance considerably, according to the lips that utter it. To some persons, Love in a cottage would be suggestive of dreary obscurity, privation, cold mutton, and one maid-of-all-work. To others, it might mean a villa with its lawn running down to the Thames, a basket-phaeton and pair of ponies, and the modest simplicity of footmen without powder. To another class of minds, again, Love in a cottage might stand for a comprehensive hieroglyph of honest affection, sufficiently robust to live and thrive even on a diet of cold mutton, and warm-blooded enough to defy the nip of poverty's east winds. Lady Seely had joked, in her cheerful, candid way, with her niece-in-law about her establishment in life, and had said, "Well, Castalia, you'll have love in a cottage, at all events! Some people are worse off. And at your age, you know (quite between ourselves), you must think yourself lucky to get a husband at all." Miss Kilfinane had made some retort to the effect that she did not intend to remain all her life in a cottage, with or without love; and that if Lord Seely could do nothing for Ancram, she (Castalia) had other connections who might be more influential. But, in truth, Castalia did think that she could be quite content to live with Algernon Errington under a thatched roof; having only a conventional and artificial conception of such a dwelling, derived chiefly from lithographed drawing-copies. It was not, of course, that Castalia Kilfinane did not know that thatched hovels are frequently comfortless, ill-ventilated, "the noted haunt of" earwigs, and limited in the accommodation necessary for a genteel family. But such knowledge was packed away in some quite different department of her mind from that which habitually contemplated her own personal existence, present and future. Wiser folks than Castalia are apt to anticipate exceptions to general laws in their own favour. Castalia was undoubtedly in love with Algernon. That is to say, she would have liked better to be his wife in poverty and obscurity, than to accept a title and a handsome settlement from any other man whom she had ever seen; although she would probably have taken the latter had the chance been offered to her.