The courtship of the merchant was very prosaic. How long he had made up his mind that little Helen should be his wife, or at least have the chance of becoming his wife, is more than I can tell; but certain it is, that on one quarter-day--I mean her quarter-day--she received a note, in which she was invited to the house of the merchant. He said in this letter of invitation that he was very anxious to know how she was getting on, and what her prospects were; in fact, he said he was anxious to redeem the promise he had given to her dying father by the inquiries he had to make, and the intention he had formed of providing, if he could, for her welfare as long as she lived, The last sentence was the only clue offered to the design of her benefactor. That clue was enough. It showed to her acute and reflecting mind what she might expect from the merchant, and she was thereby enabled to survey at her leisure, before the appointed interview, the prospect laid open to her. She balanced in her own mind all the apparent advantages and all the disadvantages of becoming Mrs. Green. She had no very high respect for Mr. Green's character,--yet she had no aversion to him. He was, indeed, one of those easy-going, even-natured men, who neither arouse affection nor excite the opposite of love. He was by no means the ideal which she had formed of a husband. Yet how could she, who had been a poor daily governess all her life, release her ambition in this respect? She had indulged the hope, as I dare say most young women have hoped, to marry a man handsome, educated, and of gentlemanly training--with a fortune. She would have been satisfied with a man of good standing or prospects in either one of the liberal professions--the army, navy, the law, or even the church. But a dispassionate consideration of Mr. Green's letter drove away all the phantasms of such ambition. She came, by a process of the severest reasoning, to the conclusion, in the first place, that, if she rejected the merchant's intended proposal, she might offend him. That was not, after all, so very serious a matter, as she was not very largely dependent upon his bounty; yet she could hardly afford to lose a friend. This conclusion led her to survey the bright side of Mr. Green's intended proposal. She would certainly, as Mrs. Green, be mistress of a liberal establishment. His years denied the reasonable prospect of her ever having a child. Yet this young woman, hardened by experience, saw a compensation for that denial of a true woman's hope in the freedom from a mother's cares and troubles. It was something to get rid of the drudgery of toil, and escape the snubbing and rebuffs of her present vocation. "Yes," at length she said to herself, in forming her resolution, "I might do worse than become Mrs. Green."