Mr. Stanley had three daughters, and a son who was at Cambridge; and a pretty old Rectory with beautiful rooms, and everything very graceful and handsome about him. The young people were certainly a drawback to any matrimonial aspirations on his part; but it was surmised that he entertained them all the same. Miss Mildmay was one of the people who was most deeply convinced on this subject. She had an eye which could see through stone walls in this particular. She knew when a man conceived the idea of asking a woman to marry him before he knew it himself. When she decided that a thing was to be (always in this line) it came to pass. Her judgment was infallible. She knew all the signs--how the man was being wrought up to the point of proposing, and what the woman’s answer was going to be--and she took the keenest interest in the course of the little drama. It was only a pity that she had so little exercise for her faculty in that way, for there were few marriages in Sliplin. The young men went away and found their wives in other regions; the young women stayed at home, or else went off on visits where, when they had any destiny at all, they found their fate. It was therefore all the more absorbing in its interest when anything of the kind came her way. Stella’s affair had been outside her orbit, and she had gained no advantage from it; but the rector and the doctor and Katherine Tredgold were a trio that kept her attention fully awake. There was a party in the Rectory about Christmas, at which all Sliplin was present. It was a delightful house for a party. There was a pretty old hall most comfortably warmed--which is a rare attraction in halls--with a handsome oak staircase rising out of it, and a gallery above which ran along two sides. The drawing-room was also a beautiful old room, low, but large, with old furniture judiciously mingled with new, and a row of recessed windows looking to the south and clothed outside with a great growth of myrtle, with pink buds still visible at Christmas amid the frost and snow. Inside it was bright with many lamps and blazing fires; and there were several rooms to sit in, according to the dispositions of the guests--the hall where the young people gathered together, the drawing-rooms to which favoured people went when they were bidden to go up higher, and Mr. Stanley’s study, where a group of sybarites were always to be found, for it was the warmest and most luxurious of all. The hall made the greatest noise, for Bertie was there with various of his own order, home, like himself, for Christmas, and clusters of girls, all chattering at the tops of their voices, and urging each other to the point of proposing a dance, for which the hall was so suitable, and quite large enough. The drawing-room was full of an almost equally potent volume of sound, for everybody was talking, though the individual voices might be lower in tone. But in the study it was more or less quiet.