"A few hundreds laid out upon it would make it comfortable enough," said the practical Mr. O'Boyneville; "but I don't see how the place could ever be worth more than a hundred a-year at this distance from London; and it must sell as cheap as rags to give you five per cent. for your money." Oh, if I had only been rich enough to buy it! she thought. She did not know any thing about percentages or profitable investments; but if she had been free to do her own will, she would have given every sixpence she possessed in the world to be owner of Chudleigh Combe. And yet she never thought of asking Mr. O'Boyneville to purchase the dwelling-place she loved with some portion of the money he had settled upon her. She had tried with all her might to prevent the making of that settlement, and had told her lover that under no circumstances could she ever bring herself to look upon the money as her own. "I have very little use for what people call pin-money," she said, "for you know, Laurence, that I have been accustomed all my life to be economical. Let me have fifty or sixty pounds a-year for my clothes if you like, and I will dress as well as I have ever been used to dress. But I don't want to be extravagant because you are generous." The barrister kissed his affianced bride, and told her that she was an angel, and that she dressed exquisitely; but the settlement was made nevertheless, and Mrs. MacClaverhouse declared that Laurence O'Boyneville had acted nobly. And during the visit to Chudleigh Combe he was very kind and very patient; though he examined the window-sashes, and sounded the partitions, and rattled the locks, and poked the ceilings, and peered up the chimneys, and jumped upon the floors with a view to testing the strength of the timbers, and altogether behaved in a more practical way than quite harmonised with Cecil's pensive spirit: but he gave her plenty of time for tender meditations while he prowled amongst stables and offices, tasted the water from a couple of pumps in a long stone courtyard, and measured the length and breadth of the grounds with a surveyor's accurate three-foot stride It was only when the autumn afternoon was deepening into evening that he swooped down upon Cecil, as she stood on the lawn by a rustic basket--that had once held such a wealth of geraniums, and in which now only a few straggling sprigs of mignonette lingered amid a wilderness of weeds--and asked her sharply if she was ready to go away. "Yes, Laurence," she said, "quite ready." And then, as they walked back to the carriage, she said, rather to herself than to her husband: "I wonder who will buy Chudleigh Combe?" "Ah, so do I," cried Mr. O'Boyneville, swinging his stick, "he'll have to spend something like a thousand pounds upon the place before he makes it habitable, whoever he is." CHAPTER XIV. MR. LOBYER'S WOOING.