“No; Mark must bid him not come. He will not wish to pain me when it can do no good. Look here, Mark;” and she walked over to her brother, and put both her hands upon his arm. “I do love Lord Lufton. I had no such meaning or thought when I first knew him. But I do love him—I love him dearly;—almost as well as Fanny loves you, I suppose. You may tell him so if you think proper—nay, you must tell him so, or he will not understand me. But tell him this, as coming from me: that I will never marry him, unless his mother asks me.” “She will not do that, I fear,” said Mark, sorrowfully. “No; I suppose not,” said Lucy, now regaining all her courage. “If I thought it probable that she should wish me to be her daughter-in-law, it would not be necessary that I should make such a stipulation. It is because she will not wish it; because she would regard me as unfit to—to—to mate with her son. She would hate me, and scorn me; and then he would begin to scorn me, and perhaps would cease to love me. I could not bear her eye upon me, if she thought that I had injured her son. Mark, you will go to him now; will you not? and explain this to him;—as much of it as is necessary. Tell him, that if his mother asks me I will—consent. But that as I know that she never will, he is to look upon all that he has said as forgotten. With me it shall be the same as though it were forgotten.” Such was her verdict, and so confident were they both of her firmness—of her obstinacy Mark would have called it on any other occasion,—that they, neither of them, sought to make her alter it. “You will go to him now,—this afternoon; will you not?” she said; and Mark promised that he would. He could not but feel that he himself was greatly relieved. Lady Lufton might probably hear that her son had been fool enough to fall in love with the parson’s sister, but under existing circumstances she could not consider herself aggrieved either by the parson or by his sister. Lucy was behaving well, and Mark was proud of her. Lucy was behaving with fierce spirit, and Fanny was grieving for her. “I’d rather be by myself till dinner-time,” said Lucy, as Mrs. Robarts prepared to go with her out of the room. “Dear Fanny, don’t look unhappy; there’s nothing to make us unhappy. I told you I should want goat’s milk, and that will be all.” Robarts, after sitting for an hour with his wife, did return again to Framley Court; and, after a considerable search, found Lord Lufton returning home to a late dinner. “Unless my mother asks her,” said he, when the story had been told him. “That is nonsense. Surely you told her that such is not the way of the world.” Robarts endeavoured to explain to him that Lucy could not endure to think that her husband’s mother should look on her with disfavour. “Does she think that my mother dislikes her—her specially?” asked Lord Lufton.