“Perhaps because Ada and you do it all,” said Gussy, unmoved by that despairing appeal which the old is always making to the new. Why cannot you do as we do? Poor Lady Augusta! It was she who had to give in, not her daughter. And you may easily understand, dear reader, how such a good mother was affected by the break-down of all her elder hopes--Ada, Helena, Gussy. Her three eldest children--all failures! What a heart-breaking thought it was to a woman of fashion, surrounded by contemporaries who had married their daughters well, and whom no man could reproach as negligent of their highest duties! She would wake sometimes in the middle of the night, and ask herself was it her fault? Had she put foolish notions into the heads of the girls? Certainly on the Thornleigh side there were no “views” nor “crotchets;” and Lady Augusta was aware that she herself had accomplished her own fate, not altogether because she preferred it, and had, perhaps, smothered personal predilections, which her children showed no inclination to smother. “Why cannot they do as I did?” she would say in her heart, with a sigh. But now at last a moment had come, in which her natural cares were rewarded. When Lord Granton proposed for Mary, her mother had almost cried with joy. For the first time here was a satisfactory--a completely satisfactory conclusion. So unexceptionable a young man, such a title, such estates, and a family which any girl might be proud to enter! The delight was all the sweeter from being so long deferred, so sadly missed. She forgave Helena her bad match, and Gussy and Ada their no matches at all, in the exhilaration of this happy moment. All her little grievances and grudges vanished in the sudden flood of sunshine. She was reconciled to all the world, even to Helena’s husband, the Professor, over whom, too, a heavenly radiance would be flung, when he was brother-in-law to a marquis. Poor Lady Augusta! In the full height of her exhilaration she betook herself to Tottenham’s to send the good news to her sister, feeling that now at least, perhaps for the first time, there was no trouble to lessen her happiness; and there she encountered, without any warning, Edgar! Heaven help her! a man still more objectionable, because more hopelessly penniless than Helena’s professor, a man without a name, without a shilling, without a connection! but whom Gussy, her favourite daughter, was ready, she knew, to follow to the end of the world. When she drove out to the rural Tottenham’s after this, to tell her sister the story of Mary’s engagement, is it wonderful that her agitated mind should have poured forth all its mingled strain of joy, tribulation, content, and alarm? The wholly joyful part of her budget was soon swallowed up in the revelation of her fears about Gussy, and in the reproaches she could not quite restrain. Why had her sister so added to her burdens, by this injudicious, this uncalled-for interference in Edgar’s fortunes? He was