When Sara thought over it at a later period of the night, she laughed a little in her own mind at poor Fanny’s ignorance. Could she but know that the poor clerk was an enchanted prince! Could she but guess that it was in pure obedience to her father’s wishes that she had given him such a reception! When he appeared in his true shape, whatever that might be, how uncomfortable little Fanny would feel at the recollection of what she had said! And then Sara took to guessing and wondering what his true shape might be. She was not romantic to speak of in general. She was only romantic in her own special case; and when she came to think of it seriously, her good sense came to her aid--or rather not to her aid--to her hindrance and confusion and bewilderment. Sara knew very well that in those days people were not often found out to be princes in disguise. She knew even that for a clerk in her father’s office to turn out the heir to a peerage or even somebody’s son would be so unusual as to be almost incredible. And what, then, could her father mean? Neither was Mr. Brownlow the sort of man to pledge his soul on his daughter in any personal emergency. Yet some cause there must be. When she had come this length, a new sense seemed suddenly to wake up in Sara’s bosom, perhaps only the result of her own thoughts, perhaps suggested, though she would not have allowed that, by Fanny Hardcastle’s advice--a sudden sense that she had been coming down from her natural sphere, and that her father’s clerk was not a fit mate for her. She was very generous, and hasty, and high-flown, and fond of her father, and fond of amusement--and moved by all these qualities and affections together she had jumped at the suggestion of Mr. Brownlow’s plan; but perhaps she had never thought seriously of it as it affected herself that night. Now it suddenly occurred to her how people might talk. Strangely enough, the same thought which had been bitterness to her father, stung her also, as soon as her eyes were opened. Miss Brownlow of Brownlows, who had refused, or the same thing as refused, Sir Charles Motherwell--whom young Keppel had regarded afar off as utterly beyond his reach--the daughter of the richest man, and herself one of the most popular (Sara did not even to herself say the prettiest; she might have had an inkling of that too, but certainly she did not put it into articulate thought) girls in the county--she bending from her high estate to the level of a lawyer’s clerk; she going back to the hereditary position, reminding every body that she was the daughter of the Masterton attorney, showing the low tastes which one generation of higher culture could not be supposed to have effaced! How could she do it? If she had been a duke’s daughter it would not have mattered. In such a case nobody could have thought of hereditary low tastes; but now--As Sara mused, the color grew hotter and hotter in her cheeks. To think that it was only now, so late