‘I daresay it does,’ said Eleanor, in a tone of such strong and unguarded displeasure, that Ada immediately thought, ‘She’s jealous of Miss Wynter for something. Ma said she was.’ ‘But,’ Eleanor pursued, ‘you had not been dictated to. I understand that you promised Mr. Camm——’ ‘Well, I did; but——’ ‘But you should not have broken your promise. Please do excuse my saying it. I daresay I have no business to, but I feel so much interested in you and Mr. Camm. I have heard so much about him, and I think he must be so remarkably clever and interesting——’ ‘Do you!’ exclaimed Ada, in unaffected astonishment. ‘Well, I never!’ ‘I feel perfectly certain that he is very clever, and that some day he will make a mark in the world. I’m sure there is no doubt about that. You should be very proud to have won the love of such a man, for I am sure that you will have reason to be proud to be his wife, some day.’ ‘Eh, Miss Askam!’ Ada was, as she would have said herself, ‘taken aback’ by Miss Askam’s earnestness, and especially by the bold way in which she prophesied great things, and that, too, before the event. It had never occurred to her to look at it in that light before. Her father always said how steady and ‘decent’ Roger was; that meant, she knew, that he was expected always to have an income and a comfortable home for her, Ada. But her mother looked down upon him; and she herself, though she had been pleased and flattered with his attentions at first, and was aware that many another girl in Bradstane would have lent no unwilling ear to his courting, had lately begun to see the possibility of a future, far more highly coloured and richly gilded than any that Roger Camm had to offer her; a future more like the state of things depicted in ‘The Fate of the Falconers,’ in which the heir of an ancient and lordly house, handsome, picturesque, with the manners of a prince, and the sins of a Corsair upon his soul, became enslaved by the charms of a young girl, her own age, and, so far as she had gathered from the description, very much resembling herself in personal appearance. A secret marriage had followed; a little romantic adversity, in which lovers and flattery, and old castles and devoted retainers, of whom, she thought, old Barlow at Thorsgarth might stand as a very fair specimen, had never been missing. These romantic adjuncts had never been wanting in the story; and then came the gradual working-round, which in the end left the lovely Adela a countess, with crowds of servants, jewels, a box at the opera, and all London raving about her beauty. That—or something as near it as circumstances allowed—was the life for her, thought Ada. That was the sphere she had been born to grace; and the rapture of feeling that for her sake a man would give up his evil ways, was infinitely beyond any prosaic union with one who was not distinguished by having evil ways to give up. But here Miss Askam’s voice again disturbed her.