The marriage might be delayed; but, if the cards were played prudently, might still make everything comfortable. Such girls do not marry tailors, and will always prefer lords to tradesmen! "I hope that you do not think that my calling is intrusive," he said. The Countess, dressed all in black, with that funereal frown upon her brow which she always now wore, with deep-sunk eyes, and care legible in every feature of her handsome face, received him with a courtesy that was as full of woe as it was graceful. She was very glad to make his acquaintance. There was no intrusion. He would forgive her, she thought, if he perceived that circumstances had almost overwhelmed her with sorrow. "I have come to ask after your daughter," said he. "She has been very ill, Sir William." "Is she better now?" "I hardly know; I cannot say. They seemed to think this morning that the fever was less violent." "Then she will recover, Lady Lovel." "They do not say so. But indeed I did not ask them. It is all in God's hands. I sometimes think that it would be better that she should die, and there be an end of it." This was the first time that these two had been in each other's company, and the lawyer could not altogether repress the feeling of horror with which he heard the mother speak in such a way of her only child. "Oh, Lady Lovel, do not say that!" "But I do say it. Why should I not say it to you, who know all? Of what good will her life be to herself, or to any one else, if she pollute herself and her family by this marriage? It would be better that she should be dead,--much better that she should be dead. She is all that I have, Sir William. It is for her sake that I have been struggling from the first moment in which I knew that I was to be a mother. The whole care of my life has been to prove her to be her father's daughter in the eye of the law. I doubt whether you can know what it is to pursue one object, and only one, through your whole life, with never-ending solicitude,--and to do it all on behalf of another. If you did, you would understand my feeling now. It would be better for her that she should die than become the wife of such a one as Daniel Thwaite." "Lady Lovel, not only as a mother, but as a Christian, you should get the better of that feeling." "Of course I should. No doubt every clergyman in England would tell me the same thing. It is easy to say all that, sir. Wait till you are tried. Wait till all your ambition is to be betrayed, every hope rolled in the dust, till all the honours you have won are to be soiled and degraded, till you are made a mark for general scorn and public pity,--and then tell me how you love the child by whom such evils are brought upon you!" "I trust that I may never be so tried, Lady Lovel."