'She does like me, as a beautiful girl may like a grandfather, battered and scarred in war, or a homeless cur which she has picked up and which has grown attached to her. To be frank with you, Mr. Ellmer, nothing but my ugly face prevents me from becoming a suitor for your daughter; but that obstacle is one which, without any undue self-depreciation, I know to be one which makes happy marriage impossible for me.' 'I don't know,' said Mr. Ellmer, in a tone of generous encouragement; 'good looks don't always carry it off with the women. Look at my wife, now: well, to be sure, she was proud enough of getting me; but, do you think the feeling lasted? No, I might have been a one-eyed hunchback, sir, before we'd been man and wife three months! There's no knowing what those creatures will like, let alone the fact that they never like the same thing more than a week together--barring a miracle.' And Mr. Ellmer looked at me, with his head a little on one side, as if expecting that the narration of his experience would conclusively affect my views on matrimony. As I said nothing, however, being, indeed, too much involved in a whirlpool of doubts and longings and miserable certainties to have any neatly-turned phrases ready with which to carry on the conversation, he presently cleared his throat and went on again. 'You see,' he said, with an odd assumption of paternal dignity, which covered some genuine feeling as well as some genuine humbug, 'it isn't often that I can spare the time to take a journey as long as this. Therefore, when I do, I like to see something for my trouble. Well, and what I mean to see this time is one of two things: either I leave with the knowledge that my daughter is engaged to be married to an honourable gentleman who is able to support her, and willing to be good to her, or I leave with my daughter herself, and I put her in the way of earning her own living on the stage, which is a more honourable position than playing lodgekeeper to any gentleman in the land.' 'And you would take her mother with her, of course?' I said, as easily as I could, with a sudden gloomy misgiving that Babiole, happy as she was among the hills, would snatch at the chance of rushing into the conflicts of the busier life in which she took such an ominous interest. 'Oh, she can do as she likes,' answered Mr. Ellmer with a sudden return, at mention of his wife, to sullen and brutal ferocity of look and tone. I was horrorstruck at the possibility of my little fairy choosing to leave the shelter of the hillside under the protection of this man, whose caprice of paternal pride and affection might, I thought, at any moment of drunken irritation or disappointment, change to the selfish cruelty with which he had treated his hard-working wife.