'Ida, why will you not say yes? Do you doubt that I should try my uttermost to make you happy?' 'No,' she answered gravely, 'but I doubt my own capacity for that kind of happiness.' Dr. Rylance was deeply wounded. He had been petted and admired by women during the ten years of his widowhood, favoured and a favourite everywhere. He had made up his mind deliberately to marry this penniless girl. Looked at from a worldling's point of view, it would seem, at the first glance, an utterly disadvantageous alliance: but Dr. Rylance had an eye that could sweep over horizons other than are revealed to the average gaze, and he told himself that so lovely a woman as Ida Palliser must inevitably become the fashion in that particular society which Dr. Rylance most affected: and a wife famed for her beauty and elegance would assuredly be of more advantage to a fashionable physician than a common-place wife with a fortune. Dr. Rylance liked money; but he liked it only for what it could buy. He had no sons, and he was much too fond of himself to lead laborious days in order to leave a large fortune to his daughter. He had bought a lease of his London house, which would last his time; he had bought the freehold of the Kingthorpe cottage; and he was living up to his income. When he died there would be two houses of furniture, plate, pictures, horses and carriages, and the Kingthorpe cottage, to be realized for Urania. He estimated these roughly as worth between six and seven thousand pounds, and he considered seven thousand pounds an ample fortune for his only daughter. Urania was in happy ignorance of the modesty of his views. She imagined herself an heiress on a much larger scale. To offer himself to a penniless girl of whose belongings he knew absolutely nothing, and to be peremptorily refused! Dr. Rylance could hardly believe such a thing possible. The girl must be trifling with him, playing her fish, with the fixed intention of landing him presently. It was in the nature of girls to do that kind of thing. 'Why do you reject me?' he asked seriously; 'is it because I am old enough to be your father?' 'No, I would marry a man old enough to be my grandfather if I loved him,' answered Ida, with cruel candour. 'And I am to understand that your refusal is irrevocable? he urged. 'Quite irrevocable. But I hope you believe that I am grateful for the honour you have done me.' 'That is the correct thing to say upon such occasions, answered Dr. Rylance, coldly; 'I wonder the sentence is not written in your copy books, among those moral aphorisms which are of so little use in after life.' 'The phrase may seem conventional, but in my case it means much more than usual,' said Ida; 'a girl who has neither money nor friends has good reason to be grateful when a gentleman asks her to be his wife.'