"No!" answered Ned Hayward quickly and straightforwardly; "I never did, and never shall. I am too poor, Mr. Beauchamp, to marry in my own class of society, and maintain my wife in the state which that class implies. I am too honest to make love without intending to marry; too wise I trust to fall in love where nothing could be the result but unhappiness to myself if not to another also." He spake these few sentences very seriously; but then, resuming at once his gay rattling manner, he went on: "Oh, I have drilled myself capitally, I assure you. At twenty I was like a raw recruit, bungling at every step; found myself saying all manner of sweet things to every pretty face I met; felt my heart beating whenever, under the pretty face, I thought I discovered something that would last longer. But I saw so much of love in a cottage and its results, that, after calculating well what a woman brought up in good society would have to sacrifice who married a man with 600_l_. a-year, I voted it unfair to ask her, and made up my mind to my conduct. As soon as ever I find that I wish to dance with any dear girl twice in a night, and fall into reveries when I think of her, and feel a sort of warm blood at my fingers' ends when my hand touches hers, I am off like a hair-trigger, for if a man is bound to act with honour to other men, who can make him if he does not willingly, he is ten times more strongly bound to do so towards women, who can neither defend nor avenge themselves." With a sudden impulse Beauchamp held out his hand to him, and shook his heartily, and that grasp seemed to say, "I know you now to the heart. We are friends." Ned Hayward was a little surprised at this enthusiastic burst of Mr. Beauchamp for he had set him down for what is generally called a very gentlemanlike person, which means, in the common parlance of the world, a man who has either used up every thing like warm feeling, or has never possessed it, and who, not being troubled with any emotions, suffers polite manners and conventional habits to rule him in and out. With his usual rapid way of jumping at conclusions--which he often found very convenient, though to say the truth he sometimes jumped over the right ones--he said to himself at once, "Well, this is really a good fellow, I do believe, and a man of some heart and soul." But though Beauchamp's warm shake of the hand had led him to this conviction, and he thought he began to understand him, yet Ned Hayward was a little curious as to a question which his new friend had asked him some time before. He had answered it, it is true, by telling him that he took care not to fall in love; but he fancied that Mr. Beauchamp had inquired in a peculiar tone, and that he must have had some meaning more than the words implied, taken in their simple and straightforward application.