'Till recently you have always been accustomed to luxury and ease. These Cadbury lays at your feet, offering you--who by position and education are unfit to be a poor man's wife--absolute splendour.' 'But Bevil is not so poor as you think, and, moreover, may be richer in time,' urged Alison, piteously; 'he has prospects, expectations----' 'Of course--what sharper is without them?--and for the realization of these visions you would be waiting to the sacrifice of your youth, your beauty, and your poor old father's few remaining years.' She wrung her white hands. She had often thought before of the tradesmen's unpaid bills--of her dresses made to do duty for a second season she had never thought at all; but now the letter of Slagg had filled her with vague and undefinable terror. She could not, poor girl, understand the tenor of it altogether, but she knew it meant ruin, for she could read that in her father's anxious face; yet why should fate compel her to marry Lord Cadbury?--she could work--work or die! 'Loving Bevil as I do, papa, it would be very base of me to accept Lord Cadbury without even an atom of respect or gratitude,' said she, gathering courage from her very despair, while her eyes streamed with tears. 'I do not see that love has much to do with marriage, but know that money has a great deal,' said her father, smoothing out the letter of Solomon Slagg for re-perusal. 'Love is a luxury the poor can't afford, and it is better to marry on a little of it, and find that little increase by residence together and force of habit, than marry on much, and find that much dwindling away into mutual toleration and cold indifference.' Sir Ranald had not an atom of sympathy with or toleration for this love fancy, so he deemed it, of his daughter. His own lover-days and his marriage seemed to have come to pass so long ago as to have belonged to some state of pre-existence. He could scarcely realise them now; yet he knew they must have been; Burke and Debrett told him so; and Alison was there as a living proof of both; but his love--if love it was--had been a well-ordered arrangement with a lady of good position and ample means, not with an obscure nobody. 'Papa,' said Alison, after a silence that had been broken only by her sighs and his own, 'when urging me to do what you wish, have you no thought of the long line of the Cheynes of Essilmont, who lived there for so many centuries--who so often lost their lives in battle, but never honour, who never stained their name by any base or ignoble transaction, who lived and died so spotlessly?' This little outburst was something precisely after his own heart; he patted Alison's head of rich brown hair, and said, with a kindling in his eyes, 'It is precisely because I do think of them that I wish to see you wealthy and ennobled, raised out of this now sordid life of ours.' 'Ennobled by wedding the son of Timothy Titcomb, of Threadneedle Street!'