‘I’ve always been considered young-looking,’ said old Saymore, with a complacent smile, ‘and many and many a one has advised me to better my condition. That might be two words for themselves and one for me, Miss Anne,’ he continued, the smile broadening into a smirk of consciousness. ‘Ladies is very pushing now-a-days; but I think I’ve picked out one as will never deceive me, and, if the family don’t have any objections, I think I am going to get married, always hoping, Miss Anne, as you don’t disapprove.’ ‘To get married?’ said Anne, sitting upright with sheer amazement. Anne’s thoughts had not been occupied on this subject as the thoughts of girls often are; but it had entered her imagination suddenly, and Anne’s imagination was of a superlative kind, which shed a glory over everything that occupied it. This strange, beautiful, terrible, conjunction of two had come to look to her the most wonderful, mysterious, solemn thing in the world since it came within her own possibilities. All the comedy in it which is so apt to come uppermost had disappeared when she felt herself walking with Cosmo towards the verge of that unknown and awful paradise. Life had not turned into a tragedy indeed, but into a noble, serious poem, full of awe, full of wonder, entering in by those great mysterious portals, which were guarded as by angels of love and fate. She sat upright in her chair, and gazed with wide open eyes and lips apart at this caricature of her fancy. Old Saymore? the peal of laughter with which Rose received the announcement was the natural sentiment; but Anne had not only a deep sense of horror at this desecration of an idea so sacred, but was also moved by the secondary consciousness that old Saymore too had feelings which might be wounded, which added to her gravity. Saymore, for his part, took Rose’s laugh lightly enough, but looked at her own grave countenance with rising offence. ‘You seem to think that I haven’t no right to please myself, Miss Anne,’ he said. ‘But who is the lady? tell us who is the lady,’ cried Rose. Saymore paused and held up a finger. The voices in the corridor ceased. Some one was heard to walk away in the opposite direction, and Mrs. Mountford’s soft shuffle advanced to the hall. ‘Another time, Miss Anne, another time,’ he said, in a half whisper, shaking his finger in sign of secresy. Then he walked towards the door, and held it open for his mistress with much solemnity. Mrs. Mountford came in more quickly than usual; she was half angry, half laughing. ‘Saymore, I think you are an old fool,’ she said.