"Will you forgive me for having spoken and acted so thoughtlessly? I never meant to cause you so much anxiety. You see, I am not very well acquainted with English ways, and I may have made more mistakes than I knew. When Nora is my wife you shall not have to fear for her happiness." "You speak very confidently of making her your wife," said Janetta, forgiving him in her heart, nevertheless. "But you have no house--no profession, have you?" "No income, you mean?" said Cuthbert, with his merry smile. "Oh, yes, I have a profession. It does not pay me quite so well as it might do, but I think I shall do better by-and-bye. Then I have a couple of hundreds a year of my own. Is it too much of a pittance to begin upon?" "Nora is quite too young to begin upon anything. If only you would leave her alone for a year or two!--till she is a little more staid and sensible!" "But that's too late, don't you see? That's where my apologies have to come in. I have disturbed the peace already, haven't I?" "Mr. Brand," said Janetta, gravely, in spite of an exclamation of protest from her cousin, "I don't think that we are going quite deeply enough into the matter. There are one or two things that I must say: there is no one else to say them. Nora is young and foolish, but she is affectionate and sensitive, and if she once cares for you, you may make the happiness or the misery of her life. Our dear father told me to take care of her. And I am not sure that he would have sanctioned her engagement to you." "I'd better send Wyvis to talk to you," said Cuthbert, starting up and nearly upsetting a chair in his eagerness. "I knew he could manage and--and explain things better than I could. He's well up in the family affairs. Will you see him now?" "Now?" "He's outside waiting. He wouldn't come in. I'll go and send him to you. No, don't object: there are ever so many things that you two elders had better talk over together. I must say," said Cuthbert, beginning to laugh again in his light-hearted way, "that, when I think of Wyvis as a family man, bent on seeing his younger brother _se ranger_, and you as Nora's stern guardian, I am seized with an access of uncontrollable mirth." He caught up his hat and left the room so quickly that Janetta, taken by surprise, could not stop him. She tried to follow, but she was too late: he had rushed off, leaving the hall-door open, and a draught of cold air was ascending the stairs and causing her stepmother peevishly to remark that Janetta's visitors were really intolerable. "Who _was_ it, this time?" she asked of her second daughter Georgie, who was standing at the window--the mother and her girls being assembled in Mrs. Colwyn's bedroom, her favorite resort on cold afternoons. Georgie gave a little giggle--her manners were not perfect, in spite of a term at Mrs. Smith's superior seminary for young ladies--and answered, under her breath-- "It was Mr. Cuthbert Brand."