“On me! does it?” “I do not know what your son may have told you, Lady Lufton. For myself, I do not care to have any secrets from you in this matter; and as he has spoken to you about it, I suppose that such is his wish also. Am I right in presuming that he has spoken to you on the subject?” “Yes, he has; and it is for that reason that I have taken the liberty of sending for you.” “And may I ask what he has told you? I mean, of course, as regards myself,” said Lucy. Lady Lufton, before she answered this question, began to reflect that the young lady was taking too much of the initiative in this conversation, and was, in fact, playing the game in her own fashion, which was not at all in accordance with those motives which had induced Lady Lufton to send for her. “He has told me that he made you an offer of marriage,” replied Lady Lufton; “a matter which, of course, is very serious to me, as his mother; and I have thought, therefore, that I had better see you, and appeal to your own good sense and judgment and high feeling. Of course you are aware—” Now was coming the lecture to be illustrated by King Cophetua and Griselda, as Lucy had suggested to Mrs. Robarts; but she succeeded in stopping it for awhile. “And did Lord Lufton tell you what was my answer?” “Not in words. But you yourself now say that you refused him; and I must express my admiration for your good—” “Wait half a moment, Lady Lufton. Your son did make me an offer. He made it to me in person, up at the parsonage, and I then refused him;—foolishly, as I now believe, for I dearly love him. But I did so from a mixture of feelings which I need not, perhaps, explain; that most prominent, no doubt, was a fear of your displeasure. And then he came again, not to me but to my brother, and urged his suit to him. Nothing can have been kinder to me, more noble, more loving, more generous, than his conduct. At first I thought, when he was speaking to myself, that he was led on thoughtlessly to say all that he did say. I did not trust his love, though I saw that he did trust it himself. But I could not but trust it when he came again—to my brother, and made his proposal to him. I don’t know whether you will understand me, Lady Lufton; but a girl placed as I am feels ten times more assurance in such a tender of affection as that, than in one made to herself, at the spur of the moment, perhaps. And then you must remember that I—I myself—I loved him from the first. I was foolish enough to think that I could know him and not love him.” “I saw all that going on,” said Lady Lufton, with a certain assumption of wisdom about her; “and took steps which I hoped would have put a stop to it in time.”