Love! forty thousand lovers, he thought, reversing Hamlet’s sentiment, could not have made up the sum of the love he bore his little girl. Marriage is the happiest state, no doubt: but yet, perhaps a man has a more sensitive shrinking from transplanting the innocent creature he loves into that world of life matured than even a mother has. He did not like the idea that his Effie should pass into that further chapter of existence, and become, not as the gods, knowing good and evil, but as himself, or any other. He loved her ignorance, her absence of all consciousness, her freedom of childhood. It is true she was no longer a child; and she loved--did she love? Perhaps secretly in his heart he was better pleased to think that she had been drawn by sympathy, by her reluctance that any one should suffer, and by the impulse and influence of everybody about her, rather than by any passion on her own side, into these toils. “What do you want me to say?” He was a little softened towards the stepmother, who acknowledged honestly (she was on the whole a true sort of woman, meaning no harm) the close tie, almost closer than any other, which bound Effie to him. And he would not fail to Mrs. Ogilvie’s trust if he could help it; but what was he to say? Effie was in the garden when Uncle John went out. She had interpreted her stepmother’s commission about Rory to mean that she was not wanted, and she had been glad to escape from the old ladies and all their questions and remarks. She was coming back from the wood with a handful of withered leaves and lichens when her uncle joined her. Effie had been seized with a fit of impatience of the baskets of flowers which Fred was always bringing. She preferred her bouquet of red and yellow leaves, which every day it was getting more difficult to find. This gave Mr. Moubray the opening he wanted. “You are surely perverse,” he said, “my little Effie, to gather all these things, which your father would call rubbitch, when you have so many beautiful flowers inside.” “I cannot bear those grand flowers,” said Effie, “they are all made out of wax, I think, and they have all the same scent. Oh, I know they are beautiful! They are too beautiful, they are made up things, they are not like nature. In winter I like the leaves best.” “You will soon have no leaves, and what will you do then? and, my dear, your life is to be spent among these bonnie things. You are not to have the thorns and the thistles, but the roses and the lilies, Effie; and you must get used to them. It is generally a lesson very easily learnt.” To this Effie made no reply. After a while she began to show that the late autumn leaves, if not a matter of opposition, were not particularly dear to her--for she pulled them to pieces, unconsciously dropping a twig now and then, as she went on. And when she spoke, it was apparently with the intention of changing the subject.