"My daughter--_my_ daughter married to a sausage-maker!" Regina repeated. "Now, come, come, Queenie, you mustn't--you mustn't--hang it all, I don't know what you mustn't do! The girl fancies the boy, and he has plenty of money. He's a nice, gentlemanly chap, and she'll live in style. He's going to have a motor car; she'll live in far better style than we've ever done." "But you are not a sausage-maker," said Regina. "Alfie, Alfie, I'm afraid I couldn't have married you if you had been a sausage-maker." The word "sausage" seemed positively to stick in Regina's throat. "Queenie," said Alfred, "you know perfectly well that what I was had nothing to do with your feelings towards me. If I had been a crossing-sweeper--" "Alfie," said she, interrupting him, "a duke might sweep a crossing and sweep it nobly, and remain a duke, unsullied and unsoiled; but a duke would never make sausages!" "No, but sausages may make a duke," said Alfred, promptly. "I know just how you feel, my dear girl--I felt a sort of a lump come in my throat myself when he told me--but he was frank and unashamed. I should hate one of my girls to marry a man who was ashamed of his calling, whatever it was." "My noble Alfred!" cried Regina. "I don't know that I'm particularly noble," said Alfred. "I never feel it if I am. I'm afraid it's only your eyes that see me in such a light. But I did feel a bit of a lump in my throat, a sort of extra big stone in my gizzard, don't you know. And then it came over me that it is the girl's own choice, and that it is not for me to damp it." "But Maudie doesn't know." "In a way she does, and in another way she doesn't. I asked young Harry if he had told her the exact nature of his business. He said no, he hadn't. He had told her he was in business in the city, that they had a great many branches, but he had not told her the exact nature of it. 'We never think about it,' he said 'excepting as the business; and if our friends don't know that Bundaby's Eating Houses belong to us, well, we don't see why we should enlighten them.'" "If nobody knows--" began Regina. "Come, come, old lady, you'll have to swallow it, and we shall have to break it to the little girl, unless young Harry does it himself." It was eleven o'clock before they had any opportunity of speaking on the subject to Maudie; indeed, they were still talking the affair over when they heard the pair come into the hall, and Maudie opened the door of the room in which they were sitting. "Yes, I must go now," said Harry Marksby. "I've got to be up so fearfully early in the morning. To-morrow night I shall be able to stay a bit later." He came in, as he said, just to say good-night, and his way of saying good-night to Maudie's mother did a good deal to wipe the word "sausage" off the slate of Regina's impressionability.