"I ask this with great hesitation, because I am not yet in a position to offer your daughter such a home as I could wish, and shall eventually obtain for her. In two years I hope to be ordained, and my father's friend, Lord Rivers, has already promised him a living for his son. "If I can succeed in gaining the affections of your daughter, she will not mind waiting the time I have named. We are both young, and I would wait as Jacob did for Rachel, so great is the love I bear her. "I will only add that if you kindly grant me your consent, it will give me increased energy to prepare for my profession, and to make every effort to shorten the period of my probation, in the hope that the great happiness of making your charming daughter my cherished wife may eventually be mine. "I remain, dear Sir, "Very faithfully yours, "HENRY HALFORD." When Mr. Armstrong had read this letter hastily through, words cannot describe the angry passions that raged in his breast. What! the schoolmaster's son, an usher, a curate _in futuro_, with perhaps 80_l._ or 100_l._ a year to live upon! "What!" he thought, "give up my precious daughter to be a schoolmaster's wife, or rather drudge!--making rice puddings, mending stockings and shirts, and slaving for other people's children, and getting no thanks for it! Or perhaps in paltry comfortless apartments waiting upon her husband the curate, for whom she is often obliged to cook a dinner fit for him to eat, because the food obtained with such difficulty is spoiled by the lodging-house cooking. I've heard the misery of a curate's home described," continued the angry man, "less wages than a mechanic, and yet husband, wife, and children have to struggle to keep up appearances and to live in genteel poverty because the husband is a clergyman!" Mr. Armstrong drew his desk towards him, and dashed off a coarse insulting letter to the daring aspirant for his daughter's hand, and with the effort the fierceness of his anger evaporated, conscience made itself heard. "Why should you insult this young man for acting as you did yourself?" said the stern voice; "he is a well-born, well-bred, intelligent gentleman, which you were not when you married Maria St. Clair." "But I had money," replied self, "and he has by his own account nothing to call his own." "He or his father must have had money to pay for a university education," suggested conscience; "besides, half of the boasted fortune you talk of giving your daughter would establish these young people for life, and make them happy if they love each other."