“Certainly, if Powys likes, let him see the Claude; but I should think he would prefer the horses,” said Mr. Brownlow; and then Sara rose and shook out her long skirt, and made a little sign to the stranger to follow her. When the two young creatures disappeared, Mr. Hardcastle, who had been staring at them, open-mouthed, turned round aghast and pale with consternation upon his friend. “Brownlow, are you mad?” he said; “good heavens! if it was any body but you I should think it was softening of the brain.” “It may be softening of the brain,” said Mr. Brownlow, cheerfully; “I don’t know what the symptoms are. What’s wrong?” “What’s wrong?” said the Rector--he had to stop and pour himself out a glass of wine to collect his faculties--“why, it looks as if you meant it. Send your clerk off with your child, a young fellow like that, as if they were equals! Your _clerk_! I should not permit it with my Fanny, I can tell you that.” “Do you think Sara will run away with him?” said Mr. Brownlow, smiling. “I feel sure I can trust _him_ not to do it. Why, what nonsense you are speaking! If you have no more confidence in my little friend Fanny, I have. _She_ would be in no danger from my clerk if she were to see him every day, and show him all the pictures in the world.” “Oh, Fanny,--that is not the question,” said the Rector, half suspicious of the praise, and half pleased. “It was Sara we were talking of. I don’t believe she would care if a man was a chimney-sweep. You have inoculated her with your dreadful Radical ideas--” “I? I am not a Radical,” said Mr. Brownlow; and he still smiled, though he entered into no farther explanation. As for the Rector, he gulped down his wine, and subsided into his neck-cloth, as he did when he was disturbed in his mind. He had no parallel in his experience to this amazing indiscretion. Fanny?--no; to be sure Fanny was a very good girl, and knew her place better--she would not have offered to show the Claude, though it had been the finest Claude in the world, even to a curate, much less to a clerk. And then it seemed to Mr. Hardcastle that Mr. Brownlow’s eyes looked very heavy, and that there were many tokens half visible about him of softening of the brain.