“Indeed, I will, and like it,” said honest Nelly, smiling at him with her heart in her eyes. It seemed to Nelly that here was a sort of big brother, kinder than Frederick, wiser than Dick, who had suddenly come to her aid to disentangle for her that ravelled skein which had troubled her mind so much. She turned round to Ernest forthwith, and whispered something to him with a sweet compunction, to make up for the injustice she had done him in her heart. Mr. Vane, I am sorry to say, was not moved with like sentiments. He gave a short, audible breath of impatience through his nostrils, which he ought not to have done, and glanced at young Molyneux over Nelly’s head, and said to himself, “Confound the fellow!” I have observed that, towards a young man in Ernest’s position, this is a common sentiment--with men. Innocent was on her cousin’s other side. Mrs. Eastwood had hesitated much about this, feeling that at sixteen, and with no education, the girl ought not perhaps to be allowed to assist at a dinner party. But Mr. Vane’s presence and the family character of the whole ceremony decided her. It was a very poor pleasure to Innocent. She was dressed in a black tulle dress, like nothing she had ever worn before, and which seemed to transmogrify her and turn her into some one else. Nelly had made a valiant effort to put up her hair, and give her something of the aspect of a young lady of the period, but this even Mrs. Eastwood had resisted, saying wisely, that if Innocent appeared with her hair hanging on her shoulders, as she always wore it, it would be presumed at once that she was “still in the schoolroom” (poor Innocent, who had never been in the schoolroom in her life!), a girl not yet “out.” She answered only “Yes” or “No” to the questions Vane put to her, and would have stolen away from the drawing-room afterwards altogether if she had not been detained by something like force. The great Mrs. Molyneux took condescending notice of her, and plied her with a great many questions, all actuated by an idea of which no one in the family had the smallest conception. “I don’t doubt they neglect her shamefully,” she said to her daughter, after she had ascertained that Innocent neither played, nor sang, nor drew; that she had never been to school, nor had a governess, nor masters, and that, in short, she knew nothing.