"You'll soon be pulling in your sails," I thought. I naturally supposed that at the first word there would be an excellently acted emotional scene--kisses, tears of joy, and the rest of the rigmarole. That's how vain it makes you, gentlemen, to possess a wide purse. But the old fox knew how to drive a bargain. He knew you had to run down the prospective purchaser in order to run up the price of your goods. After I proposed for his daughter's hand, he said, all puffed up with suddenly acquired dignity: "I beg pardon, Baron, but who will guarantee that this alliance, which--revolve the matter as you will--has something unnatural about it--who will guarantee that it will turn out happy? Who will guarantee that two years from now my daughter won't come running back home some night, bareheaded, in her nightgown, and say, 'Father, I can't live with that old man. Let me stay here with you'?" Gentlemen, that was tough. "And in view of all these circumstances," he continued, "I am not justified as an honourable man and father in entrusting my daughter to you----" Very well, rejected, made a fool of. I rose, since the affair seemed to me to be ended. But he hastily pressed me back into my seat. "Or, at least, in entrusting her to you and observing the forms that I feel a man like me owes a man like you, or to express myself more clearly--by which a father endeavours to assure his daughter's future--or, to express myself still _more_ clearly--the dowry----" At that I burst out laughing. The old sharper, the old sharper! It was the dowry he had been sneaking up to! That was what the whole comedy had been about. When he saw me laugh, he sent his dignity and his pathos and his feeling of pride to the devil and laughed heartily along with me. "Well, if that's the way you are, old fellow," he said, "had I known it right away----" And with that the bargain was struck. Then the Baroness was called in, and, to her credit be it said, she forgot her assigned role and fell on my neck before her husband had had a chance, for the sake of appearances, to explain the situation. But Iolanthe! She appeared at the threshold pale as death, her lips tightly compressed, her eyes half shut. Without saying a word and standing there motionless as a stone, she held both hands out to me, and then allowed her parents to kiss her. You see, that gave me food for thought again. CHAPTER V What I had dreaded, gentlemen, did not come about. Evidently, I had underestimated my popularity in the district. My engagement met with general favour, both among the gentry and the rest of the people. Nothing but beaming faces when they shook hands and congratulated me. To be sure, at such a time the whole world is in a conspiracy to lure a man on still farther along the road to his fate. People are nice and amiable to you and then, just when something threatens to go wrong, they turn on you snapping and snarling.