In Wilford’s voice there was a tone warning the mother that opposition would only feed the flame, and so she offered none directly, but heard him patiently to the end, and then quietly questioned him of Katy and her family, especially the last. What did he know of it? Was it one to detract from the Cameron line, kept untarnished so long? Were the relatives such as he never need blush to own even if they came there into their drawing-rooms as they would come if Katy did? Wilford thought of Uncle Ephraim as he had seen him upon the platform at Silverton, and could scarcely repress a smile as he pictured to himself his mother’s consternation at beholding that man in her drawing-room. But he did not mention the deacon, though he acknowledged that Katy’s family friends were not exactly the Cameron style. But Katy was young: Katy could be easily moulded, and once away from her old associates, his mother and sisters could make of her what they pleased. “I understand, then, that if you marry her you do not marry the family,” and in the handsome matronly face there was an expression from which Katy would have shrunk, could she have seen it and understood its meaning. “No, I do not marry the family,” Wilford rejoined emphatically, but the expression of his face was different from his mother’s, for where she thought only of herself, not hesitating to trample on all Katy’s love of home and friends, Wilford remembered Katy, thinking how he would make amends for separating her wholly from her home as he surely meant to do if he should win her. “Did I tell you,” he continued, “that her father was a judge? She must be well connected on that side. And now, what shall I do?” he asked playfully. “Shall I propose to Katy Lennox, or shall I try to forget her?” “I should not do either,” was Mrs. Cameron’s reply, for she knew that trying to forget her was the surest way of keeping her in mind, and she dared not confess to him how determined she was that Katy Lennox should never be her daughter if she could prevent it. If she could not, then as a lady and a woman of policy, she should make the most of it, receiving Katy kindly and doing her best to educate her up to the Cameron ideas of style and manner. “Let matters take their course for awhile,” she said, “and see how you feel after a little. We are going to Newport the first of August, and perhaps you may find somebody there infinitely superior to this Katy Lennox. That’s your father’s ring. He is earlier than usual to-night. I would not tell him yet, till you are more decided,” and the lady went hastily out into the hall to meet her husband.