“Because, alas! it is true,” he said; “you got this character of me before you knew me? Ah, I was sure you had! and you see it is realized; but Lætitia is good for us both. Some part of her goodness is after a droll fashion, I confess. She is prodigiously High Church; she keeps a poor little parson in petticoats and a cloak, whom she calls father, and treats, I fear, as she treats her housemaids; but mind, she is very good both to the housemaids and the parson. I think Father Featherstone is a mistake; but if there ever was a good woman bent on doing good and succeeding in the attempt, it is my sister Lætitia. She will be very good to Innocent. You need not fear to trust her in my sister’s hands.” “I like men who believe in their sisters,” said Mrs. Eastwood with a smile. And Nelly looked at him. She did not say anything, but her lips moved as if she would have echoed her mother’s words. Nelly’s face had grown somehow longer, with a wistful expression which, by moments, was almost like Innocent’s. Especially when she looked at John Vane was this the case; a perpetual comparison seemed to be going on in her mind, almost a complaint against him that he was different from the other who was so much more important to her. Why should Vane always be of use and service when that other neglected his duties? Why should he be, as Ernest said, always on the spot when the other was away? Nelly was half angry with the man who was so ready to stand by her; and then there came over her heart the softest compunction and self-reproach, mingled--in that inextricable complication which belongs to all human feeling--with bitterness and mortification. Was it possible that she grudged the kindness of the one because it threw into further relief the indifference of the other? This, as the reader will easily see, was a very unsafe, as well as a very uncomfortable, state of mind for an engaged young woman. Perhaps on the whole, the kindest thing John Vane could have done would have been to take himself out of the way, and leave Ernest to show himself in the best light possible, a thing which his constant presence put out of the question.