“And what did you do?” said Marian, continuing her inquiries: she forgot her shyness in following up this story, which she knew and did not know. “What all the village lads do who get into scrapes and break the hearts of the old women,” said Louis, with a somewhat bitter jesting. “I listed for a soldier--but there was not even an old woman to break her heart for me.” “Oh, there was Rachel!” cried Marian eagerly. “Yes, indeed, there was Rachel, my good little sister,” answered the young man; “but her kind heart would have mended again had they let me alone. It would have been better for us both.” He said this with a painful compression of his lip, which a certain wistful sympathy in the mind of Marian taught her to recognise as the sign of tumult and contention in this turbulent spirit. She hastened with a womanly instinct to direct him to the external circumstances again. “And you were really a soldier--a--not an officer--only a common man.” Marian shrunk visibly from this, which was an actual and possible degradation, feared as the last downfall for the “wild sons” of the respectable families in the neighbourhood of Bellevue. “Yes, I belong to a class which has no privileges; there was not a drummer in the regiment but was of better birth than I,” exclaimed Louis. “Ah, that is folly--I did very well. In Napoleon’s army, had I belonged to that day!--but in my time there was neither a general nor a war.” “Surely,” said Marian, who began to be anxious about this unfortunate young man’s “principles,” “you would not wish for a war?” “Should you think it very wrong?” said Louis with a smile. “Yes,” answered the young Mentor with immediate decision; for this conversation befell in those times, not so very long ago, when everybody declared that such convulsions were over, and that it was impossible, in the face of civilisation, steamboats, and the electric telegraph, to entertain the faintest idea of a war. They had reached this point in their talk, gradually growing more at ease and familiar with each other, when it suddenly chanced that Mamma, passing from her own sleeping-room to that of the girls, paused a moment to look out at the small middle window in the passage between them, and looking down, was amazed to see this haughty and misanthropic Louis passing quietly along the trim pathway of the garden, keeping his place steadily by Marian’s side. Mrs Atheling was not a mercenary mother, neither was she one much given to alarm for her daughters, lest they should make bad marriages or fall into unfortunate love; but Mrs Atheling, who was scrupulously proper, did not like to see her pretty Marian in such friendly companionship with “a young man in such an equivocal position,” even though he was the brother of her friend. “We may be kind to them,” said Mamma to herself, “but we are not to go any further; and, indeed, it would be very sad if he should come to more grief about Marian, poor young man;--how pretty she is!”