“Oh, hush!” cried Agnes, a smile and a flush and a sudden brightness running over all her face; “but suppose it _should_ be so, you know, Marian--only suppose it for our own pleasure--what a delight it would be! It might help Charlie on better than anything; and then what we could do for Bell and Beau! Of course it is nonsense,” said Agnes, with a low laugh and a sigh of excitement, “but how pleasant it would be!” “It is not nonsense at all; I think it is quite certain,” said Marian; “but then people would seek you out, and you would have to go and visit them--great people--clever people. Would it not be odd to hear real ladies and gentlemen talking in company as they talk in books?” “I wonder if they do,” said Agnes, doubtfully. “And then to meet people whom we have heard of all our lives--perhaps Bulwer even!--perhaps Tennyson! Oh, Marian!” “And to know they were very glad to meet _you_,” exclaimed the sister dreamer, with another low laugh of absolute pleasure: that was very near the climax of all imaginable honours--and for very awe and delight the young visionaries held their breath. “And I think now,” said Marian, after a little interval, “that perhaps it is better Charlie should be a lawyer, for he would have so little at first in papa’s office, and he never could get on, more than papa; and you would not like to leave all the rest of us behind you, Agnes? I know you would not. But I hope Charlie will never grow like Mr Foggo, so old and solitary; to be poor would be better than that.” “Then I could be Miss Willsie,” said Agnes, “and we should live in a little square house, with two bits of lawn and two fir-trees; but I think we would not call it Killiecrankie Lodge.” Over this felicitous prospect there was a great deal of very quiet laughing--laughing as sweet and as irrepressible as any other natural music, but certainly not evidencing any very serious purpose on the part of either of the young sisters to follow the example of Miss Willsie. They had so little thought, in their fair unconscious youth, of all the long array of years and changes which lay between their sweet estate and that of the restless kind old lady, the mistress of Mr Foggo’s little square house. “And then, for me--what should I do?” said Marian. There were smiles hiding in every line of this young beautiful face, curving the pretty eyebrow, moving the soft lip, shining shy and bright in the sweet eyes. No anxiety--not the shadow of a shade--had ever crossed this young girl’s imagination touching her future lot. It was as rosy as the west and the south, and the cheeks of Maud in Mr Tennyson’s poem. She had no thought of investigating it too closely; it was all as bright as a summer day to Marian, and she was ready to spend all her smiles upon the prediction, whether it was ill or well.