“Engaged to _her_!” the merchant exclaimed, when his daughter carried him the news of Julia’s conquest,--“engaged to Julia Desmond! Why, I fully believed that he came to Twickenham on your account, Maude. I said nothing to you about the matter, because girls have sometimes such absurd notions, and I thought it better to let things take their course. And so Julia has entrapped him, has she? I ought to have been on my guard against Ryan O’Brien Desmond’s daughter.” “How can you talk like that, papa?” cried Miss Hillary. “I’m sure Julia and Mr. Tredethlyn are really in love with each other, and dear Julia is perfectly disinterested. And then, if Mr. Tredethlyn had been ever so much in love with me--and I’m sure he never cared the least bit about me--how could you suppose that I could ever dream of marrying him; when I--when he’s such a very common kind of person?” Harcourt Lowther’s name had been almost trembling on Miss Hillary’s lips, but she had remembered her father’s aversion to that name, and had modified the conclusion of her sentence in deference to his prejudice. “A very common kind of person!” repeated Lionel Hillary, in a thoughtful tone; “yes, yes, my dear, I dare say he is, I dare say he is. But I’ve seen women as beautiful as you married to commoner men than Francis Tredethlyn.” And then, after a brief silence, the merchant’s manner changed all of a sudden; he took his daughter in his arms, and pressed his lips upon her forehead with an almost passionate fondness. “My darling! my darling!” he cried, “do you think it wouldn’t please me to see you married to a man you could love?” Maude looked up into his face with a sweet smile upon her own: her lips parted, and in the next moment Harcourt Lowther’s name would have been spoken and his cause pleaded by those innocent lips. But it seemed as if her father in a manner anticipated what she would have said; for he put her from him suddenly, and turned away with a faint shiver of pain. “I am very sorry to hear of this engagement between Julia and that young man,” he said, with his face averted from his daughter, and his hands nervously shuffling among the papers on the table before him. “I am very much vexed. There, go, Maude; you don’t understand, you can’t understand. Go, my dear; I’m busy.”