"Mr. Daniel Thwaite!" said Alice, who had heard enough of the case to know who the Thwaites were. "He is a tailor!" "Yes," said Lady Anna proudly; "he is a tailor." "Surely that cannot be good," said Alice, who, having long since felt what it was to be the daughter of a serjeant, had made up her mind that she would marry nothing lower than a barrister. "It is what you call bad, I dare say." "I don't think a tailor can be a gentleman." "I don't know. Perhaps I wasn't a lady when I promised him. But I did promise. You can never know what he and his father did for us. I think we should have died only for them. You don't know how we lived;--in a little cottage, with hardly any money, with nobody to come near us but they. Everybody else thought that we were vile and wicked. It is true. But they always were good to us. Would not you have loved him?" "I should have loved him in a kind of way." "When one takes so much, one must give in return what one has to give," said Lady Anna. "Do you love him still?" "Of course I love him." "And you wish to be his wife?" "Sometimes I think I don't. It is not that I am ashamed for myself. What would it have signified if I had gone away with him straight from Cumberland, before I had ever seen my cousins? Supposing that mamma hadn't been the Countess--" "But she is." "So they say now;--but if they had said that she was not, nobody would have thought it wrong then for me to marry Mr. Thwaite." "Don't you think it wrong yourself?" "It would be best for me to say that I would never marry any one at all. He would be very angry with me." "Lord Lovel?" "Oh no;--not Lord Lovel. Daniel would be very angry, because he really loves me. But it would not be so bad to him as though I became Lord Lovel's wife. I will tell you the truth, dear. I am ashamed to marry Mr. Thwaite,--not for myself, but because I am Lord Lovel's cousin and mamma's daughter. And I should be ashamed to marry Lord Lovel." "Why, dear?"