"Uncle Frederick, I shall never, as long as I live, forget the kind words you have said to me. And, whatever happens, don't believe I am ungrateful." "Well, Frederick?" said Mrs. Dormer-Smith, when her husband re-appeared in her room. Frederick walked to the window, took out his pocket-handkerchief, and answered from behind it, rather huskily-- "Well, I don't know. I almost hope it may come right." "Do you? Do you really? Well, that is a feeble ray of comfort. But it is rather too bad to have to undergo all this wear and tear of feeling, in order to secure that perverse child's fortune in spite of herself!" There was a long pause, during which Mr. Dormer-Smith continued to look out of the window, and to blow his nose in a furtive kind of way. "I wonder----" he began slowly, and then stopped himself. "You wonder--Frederick? Pray speak out! I assure you I am not able to stand much more suspense and anxiety." "I was merely going to say, I wonder if there can be any one else." "Any one else?" "Any man she cares for." "Good Heavens, Frederick, who should there be? Really, you are not very considerate to startle me with such extraordinary suppositions without the least preparation. There is no one, of course." "You are sure?" "I am sure there is no one _possible_. I know, of course, every man she has danced with, or who has paid her the smallest attention, and there is not one who could be thought of for a moment, even if Mr. Bragg did not exist. I should not hesitate to speak very strongly if I suspected her of any culpable folly of that kind. A girl without a farthing in the world! And her father, my poor unfortunate brother Augustus, in Heaven knows what dreadful position! That May, under all the circumstances, can behave in this way, is too intolerable. The more one thinks of it the more flagrant it seems. No sense of duty! No consideration for her family! I shall be compelled to say to her----" Suddenly, in the midst of these fluent, softly uttered sentences, Mr. Dormer-Smith turned round, wiped his eyes, blew his nose defiantly, and said, with an explosion of feeling-- "The girl's a fine creature, and, by God, I won't have her baited!" CHAPTER III. Each mortal's private feelings are the measure of the importance of events to him. And it often happens that while our neighbours are pitying or envying us, on account of some circumstance which, all the world agrees, must have a weighty bearing on our fate, we are mainly indifferent to it, and are occupied with some inner grief or joy, which would seem to them very trivial. To have received and rejected an offer of marriage from a man worth fifty thousand a year would have been deemed by most of May Cheffington's acquaintance about as important an event as could have happened to her--short of death! But to her it was absolutely as nothing, compared with the facts that Owen was on the point of returning to England, and that he was to live in Mrs. Bransby's house.