“I could not go, I cannot go,” said Marjory. “Mr. Fanshawe will forgive me, that I cannot think of anything but one thing. Oh, Uncle Charles! have we done anything to bring such misery on the house?” “My dear,” said Mr. Charles, “the rain and the sun come on the just and on the unjust, as the Scriptures say. We are not justified in forming any rash judgment on ourselves.” “And we have been happy so long!” said Marjory with tears. It seemed a kind of reason for all the misery that was coming now. “Happy, humph! I would not say--there is many a thing that looks like happiness when you are in great trouble, that was little to brag of when it was here. But in the meantime, I’m going back to my papers,” said Mr. Charles, “Mr. Fanshawe, my man, come you with me, you’ll perhaps find something to divert you. She’s better left to herself--far better left to herself,” he added in an undertone. “Women-folk are not like us, she’ll take a cry and she’ll be better. To be sure,” said Mr. Charles, as he led the way to his tower, looking back upon his reluctant follower, “there’s ill men and good men in all the degrees; but I cannot think of a difference so great among us as between that girl, my niece, May, and the like of the selfish creature that wrote that letter. Not a word, not a thought of poor Charlie, as fine a lad as ever stepped--but all her bit miserable bantling of a baby, and her weary self.” “I suppose, Sir, when a woman has a child she thinks of nothing else,” said Fanshawe, “or so at least people say.” “Then the Lord preserve my niece, May, from ever having children!” said Mr. Charles, striding up the steps of his tower with his long legs, and with hot but holy indignation in his tone. Luckily the echoing of the spiral staircase drowned the laugh with which his companion listened. Fanshawe laughed only from his lips, for to tell the truth the suggestion annoyed him. He seemed immediately to see Marjory with a child in her arms, lavishing fondness upon it, while some idiot of a husband looked complacently on. Sometimes men love to weave such associations about women, sometimes on the contrary they are revolted by the notion; and the latter was Fanshawe’s case. He had not gone so far as even to dream of the possibility of marrying Marjory, or anyone else himself--and of course she would marry, some fool, some Johnnie something or other who never could, never would satisfy that woman’s mind. She would do it out of mere kindness, to please him, or to please somebody else, some old grandmother or uncle, or ancient bore of one kind or another, and drop into a mere child-producing, baby-worshipping dowdy; she would be compelled to take to babies, the husband being a fool and unworthy of her. Fanshawe listened to Mr. Charles’s lecture on the history of the Fife families with languor after this, making now and then an impertinent observation which startled the sage.