‘No, Miss Clare, not your envy,’ protested Sampson, with exceeding tenderness. ‘You can envy no one. Perfection has no need to envy. It must feel its own superiority. But I was about to observe, in confidence, that I would rather the housekeeping money was spent on butter than on bonnets; and that when I feel myself deprived of any little luxury, it is a poor consolation to know that my self-denial will provide Eliza with a neck ribbon. No, my dear Miss Clare, the hour must come when my sister will have to give up the keys of her cupboards at The Laurels, and retire to a home of her own. She is amply provided for. There will be no unkindness in such a severance. You know the old proverb, “Two is company, three is none.” It doesn’t sound grammatical, but it’s very true. When I marry, Eliza will have to go.’ ‘But you are not thinking of matrimony yet awhile, I hope, Mr. Sampson?’ ‘Yet awhile,’ echoed Sampson; ‘I’m three-and-thirty. If I don’t take the business in hand now, Miss Clare, it will be too late. I am thinking of matrimony, and have been thinking of it very constantly for the last six months. But there is only one girl in the world that I would care to marry, and if she won’t have me I shall go down to my grave a bachelor.’ ‘Don’t say that,’ cried Celia. ‘That is deciding things much too hastily. You haven’t seen all the girls in the world. How can you know anything about it? Hazlehurst is such a narrow sphere. A man might as well live in a nutshell, and call that life. You ought to travel. You ought to see the world of fashion. There are charming boarding-houses at Brighton, now, where you would meet very stylish girls. Why don’t you try Brighton?’ ‘I don’t want to try Brighton, or anywhere else,’ exclaimed Mr. Sampson, with a wounded air. ‘I tell you I am fixed, fixed as fate. There is only one girl in this magnificent universe I want for my wife. Celia, you must feel it, you must know it--you are that girl.’ ‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ cried Celia. ‘This is quite too dreadful.’ ‘It is not dreadful at all. Don’t be carried away by the first shock of the thing. I may have been too sudden, perhaps. Oh, Celia, I have worshipped too long in silence, and I may, perchance’--Mr. Sampson rather dwelt on the perchance, which seemed to him a word of peculiar appropriateness, almost a lapse into poetry--‘I may, perchance, have been too sudden in my avowal. But when a man is as much in earnest as I am, he does not study details. Celia, you must not say no.’ ‘But I do say no,’ protested Celia. ‘Not an irrevocable no?’ ‘Yes, a most irrevocable no. I am very much flattered, of course, and I really like you very much--as we all do--because you are good and true and honest. But I never, never, never could think of you in any other character than that of a trustworthy friend.’ ‘Do you really mean it?’ asked poor Sampson, aghast.