‘I wish, when mamma speaks of my affairs, she would speak to me,’ said Anne, with natural indignation. She was angry and indignant; and the words made, in spite of herself, a painful commotion within her. Money! what had money to do with it? She had felt the injustice, the wrong of her father’s threat; but it had not occurred to her that this could really have any effect upon her love; and though she had been annoyed to find that Cosmo would not treat the subject with seriousness, or believe in the gravity of Mr. Mountford’s menace, still she had been entirely satisfied that his apparent carelessness was the right way for him to consider it. He thought it of no importance, of course. He made jokes about it; laughed at it; beguiled her out of her gravity on the subject. Of course! what was it to him whether she was rich or poor; what did Cosmo care? So long as she loved him, was not that all he was thinking of? What would she have minded had she been told that _he_ had nothing? Not one straw--not one farthing! But when this little prose personage, with her more practical views of the question, rubbed against Anne, there did come to her, quite suddenly, a little enlightenment. It was like one chill, but by no means depressing, ray of daylight bursting in through a crevice into the land of dreams. If he had no money, and she no money, what then? Then, notwithstanding all generosity and nobleness of affection, money certainly would have something to do with it. It would count among the things to be taken into consideration; count dolefully, in so far as it would keep them apart; yet count with stimulating force as a difficulty to be surmounted, an obstacle to be got the better of. When Mrs. Mountford put her head out of the window, and called them to come in out of the falling dews, Anne went upstairs very seriously, and shut the door of her room, and sat down in her favourite chair to think it out. Fathers and mothers are supposed to have an objection to long engagements; but girls, at all events at the outset of their career, do not entertain the same objection. Anne was still in the dreamy condition of youthful rapture, transported out of herself by the new light that had come into the world, so that the indispensable sequence of marriage did not present itself to her as it does to the practical-minded. It was a barrier of fact with which, in the meantime, she had nothing to do. She was not disappointed or depressed, because _that_ was not the matter in question. It would come in time, no doubt, as the afternoon follows the morning, and autumn summer, but who would change the delights of the morning for the warmer, steady glory of three o’clock? though that also is very good in its way. She was quite resigned to the necessity of waiting, and not being married all at once. The contingency neither alarmed nor distressed her. Its immediate result was one which, indeed, most courses of thought produced in her mind at the present moment.