"No, no--that's a wrong idea! I want you to marry, dear, when the right time comes. I have been too happy myself to wish to keep you single. Marriage is the best thing that can happen to a woman, if her husband is as good and kind and noble as your father. I'm not selfish enough to spoil your life for my own benefit, Peggy; but when the times comes, remember I shall be very, very particular about the man you choose." "Where, and how, shall I earliest meet him? What are the words that he first will say?" chanted Peggy, with so disastrous an attempt at the correct tune that Mrs Saville shook with laughter, despite the pain in her head, and Hector Darcy, entering the room, demanded to know the nature of the joke. "I was singing a little ditty, and mother derided me, as usual. People always laugh when I sing, and declare that the tune is wrong. They don't seem to understand that I'm improving on the original. We were discussing my future husband, and the serenade was in his honour," explained Peggy with an unconscious serenity, at which her two companions exchanged glances of astonishment. "He is quite an imaginary hero as yet," Mrs Saville explained hastily, "but the subject having been introduced, I was explaining to Peggy that I should be extremely difficult to satisfy, and could not consent to spare her to a man who did not come up to my ideal in every respect." "And Peggy herself--what does she say? Has she an ideal, too, and what shape does it take, if one may ask?" queried Hector, with an embarrassment of manner which the mother noticed, if the daughter did not. Mrs Saville shaded her eyes with her hands and gazed keenly across the room to where the two figures stood in the window, the man so tall and imposing, the girl so small and dainty in her pretty white dress. "Oh, I'm not exacting," said Peggy coolly. "I'm going to marry a man with `heaps of money and a moustache, and a fireplace in the hall,' as Mellicent used to say when we planned out our future in the old school- days. Dear old Mill! I wonder if she is as funny as ever, and if she still mixes up her sentences in the same comical way. I shall be terribly disappointed if she doesn't. Five, six more weeks before I see her and all the other vicarage people, and already I'm in a ferment of impatience. Every mile we travel nearer home, the more I long for the time to come; and when we get to London I really don't know how I shall last out the fortnight before I go down to the country." "Would it help matters if we invited Mellicent to come and join us in London? She would enjoy the experience of living in an hotel and house- hunting with us. You can write and ask her, dear, if you like," said Mrs Saville fondly; and Peggy clasped her hands together in one of the old ecstatic gestures.