From the very first it had been Maudie rather than Julia who had caught on with the Marksbys. The Marksby girls were quiet and singularly unassuming, and as Maudie Whittaker grew older she was attracted, perhaps because of Julia's excessive energy, by quietness rather than the reverse, and was indeed herself a girl of singularly few words. But if the Marksby girls were quiet, then young Harry Marksby did not share their nature. He was himself the gayest of the gay, one who, a century ago, would have been called an "agreeable rattle;" indeed he was a young man who prided himself on stirring things up. He by no means approved of the fact that his father and mother had turned their backs upon convenient Bayswater in favor of the more distant Park. He was a young man who worked hard when he worked, and who abandoned himself to amusement when he was not working. But he was a sensible young man and did not see the force of burning the candle at both ends, so that he stayed a great deal more at home in the evenings than many a young man of his age and general proclivities would have done; and thus it was that he came somehow to fall in love with Regina Whittaker's eldest girl. And, as I said, the news fell upon the Whittaker family like a bombshell. Not that they were displeased! Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker had been too happy in their own married life to grudge either of their girls entering upon the same joys. But they had not seen it coming. Parents are often like that, and so the news came upon them with startling suddenness. "I am not surprised, though," said Regina to her husband and Julia when the great news had been broached and Harry Marksby had gone to seek his lady-love in the seclusion of the girls' own sitting-room, "I am not surprised. She is very beautiful." "Oh, mother, how can you stuff her up like that?" cried Julia. "Nobody thinks Maudie very beautiful but yourself--not even Harry. You shouldn't do it, dear. It gives us such a wrong idea of ourselves, or it might do if we hadn't got the sense to see what we see in our looking-glasses." "Your modesty," said Regina, "is most becoming. I honor and admire you for it--" "I'm off to my housekeeping class," said Julia, whisking herself out of the room. "That is the most wonderful thing about our girls," said Regina to Alfred, when they found themselves alone, "that is the most wonderful thing about our girls--their utter absence of self-consciousness. Beauty has never been a bane to them, because they have never had a vain thought between them. It is a beautiful and wonderful thing." "They're good-looking enough," said Alfred, "but they'll never, either of them, be a patch upon you, dearest." "Upon _me_?" She blushed rosy red in spite of her fifty and odd years. "Why, Alfie, looks were never my strong point. They get their looks from you."