"Well, I want to see yours for the same reason you want to see ours--curiosity. I like to poke my nose in wherever I can get it." "This, then, is our chief apartment." "You live, move and have your being here?" "Yes, my in-doors being: my sister will show you the rest." "Oh, we don't want to see any more. We only show our own public rooms, and not all of them: we generally keep one for a refuge." Miss Brunton appeared, and the ladies prolonged their call a few minutes: in leaving they invited her to the castle. Miss Brunton and her brother went with them to the gate, and when they came in again and were standing in the nutshell room, Miss Brunton said, "James, one feels as if there had been a bright light here, and it had gone suddenly out." "There has been a bright light here, and it has gone suddenly out," he said. In a few days there came an invitation to Dr. and Miss Brunton from the earl to dine at the castle. The earl fastened on Dr. Brunton as a leech or mosquito fastens on fresh blood: this was an entirely new listener, and he felt free to tell his very oldest stories without a lurking suspicion that he had told them before. And Dr. Brunton enjoyed the evening, even though Lady Louisa did not bring her charms specially to bear upon him. The earl had mixed much in the world and seen a great deal of life; and a man who has done so must be stupid indeed if he can't say something that shall be both interesting and profitable. As man to man the doctor felt every inch the earl's equal, and more, for he discovered that the earl was commonplace in intellect, and informed only in one or two beats; nor did it require strained attention to take in the meaning of his lordship's talk, so that Dr. Brunton could listen and at the same time think of the many instances--which only of late had stuck to his memory--of ladies of rank who had married professional men; indeed, it seemed, now that his thoughts were occupied with the subject, that he never opened a book of gossip or memoirs but he came on some such instance in it. Why should this not be his case? Why, indeed? It has been said that the founder of civil society was the man who first staked off a piece of ground, said it was his, and got fools to believe him: possibly the earldom of Birndale had been founded in some such way; and there it was. But the ancestors of Dr. Brunton had had neither the boldness nor the originality for such a stroke; and there he was, in the estimation of society at a very long distance indeed from equality with the earl of Birndale. But the doctor shut his eyes to this answer to his question, and began to let the tow of discretion go with the bucket of hope. "Well," said Miss Robertson when Miss Brunton and her brother got home--"well, doctor, has the beauty the gypsy-woman spoke of asked you to marry her yet?" "I don't suppose ladies ever do that," said Mary, "but Lady Louisa might, I am sure, if beauty may be a law to itself."