Standing droopingly in the august presence, and without a word to say either in her own behalf or that of her co-delinquent, the poor girl listened in silence to the stern and very bitter words of reprobation which fell from her mother’s lips. Perhaps until she so listened--until she contrasted the hard unsympathising nature of the woman to whom she owed her birth with that of the good, thoroughly-to-be-relied-on character of the man whose letter, with dimmed eyes and a very pitying heart, she had just contrived to read and comprehend--she had never rightly known how necessary the love of him, who for so many months had been her only object and point of interest at uncongenial Gillingham, had become to her. “I am well aware--no justly-reproachful words of yours can make me more so” (thus one sentence of poor George’s letter ran)--“that I have no right, in a worldly point of view, to hope that you would look otherwise than contemptuously on my humble offer. I have little besides my deep affection, and my prayers that God would enable me to contribute to your beloved daughter’s happiness, to lay before one who deserves every good gift that could be bestowed upon her. A small, _very_ small private fortune--a few hundreds a year only--in addition to the income derived from my living, is all that I possess. But, if I mistake not, Miss Vavasour’s tastes are simple ones, and she _might_, God aiding, be happier in the quiet home which she would deign to share with me than in the turmoil of the great world, and amongst the gay and rich, of whom it is said that it is hard for them to enter the kingdom of heaven.” “Methodistical stuff!” murmured Lady Millicent, turning over the leaves of a law-book, and delivering herself of the severe comment on her would-be son-in-law’s epistle at the moment when she rightly guessed that poor Rhoda had arrived at its conclusion. “Very bad taste, I think, my dear, of your admirer, condemning us _en masse_ in this summary way. But now, _do_ tell me,” laying down the pen with which she had been making notes, “what _did_ you do at Gillingham to bring upon me such a letter as that? I should have thought--but one lives and learns--that if there existed a girl in the world who would have abstained from this kind of thing, it was you; and now I find that--” “O, mamma!” began poor Rhoda, whose delicacy (and she was sensitively delicate) was severely wounded by this exordium,--“O, mamma, I did nothing! Indeed, indeed, I gave no--I mean--I did not lead--”