She looked at Clarissa closely as she said this. The girl's face had been changing from red to pale throughout the interview. She was very pale now, but quite self-possessed, and had left off blushing. Had she not given her promise--pledged away her freedom of action with regard to George Fairfax--and thus made an end of everything between them? She felt very calm, but she felt as if she had made a sacrifice. As for Daniel Granger, any reference to him and his admiration for her touched upon the regions of the absurd. Nothing--no friendly manoeuvring of Lady Laura's, no selfish desires of her father's--could ever induce her to listen for a moment to any proposition from that quarter. She asked her visitor to go into the house presently, in order to put an end to the conversation; and Lady Laura went in to say a few words to Mr. Lovel. They were very melancholy words--all about the dead, and his innumerable virtues--which seemed really at this stage of his history to have been alloyed by no human frailty or shortcoming. Mr. Lovel was sympathetic to the last degree--sighed in unison with his visitor, and brushed some stray drops of moisture from his own eyelids when Lady Laura wept. And then he went out to the carriage with my lady, and saw her drive away, with the blinds discreetly lowered as before. "What did she come about, Clarissa?" he asked his daughter, while they were going back to the house. "Only to see me, papa." "Only to see you! She must have had something very important to say to you, I should think, or she would scarcely have come at such a time." He glanced at his daughter sharply as he said this, but did not question her farther, though he would have liked to do so. He had a shrewd suspicion that this visit of Lady Laura's bore some reference to George Fairfax. Had there been a row at the Castle? he wondered, and had my lady come to scold her protegee? "I don't suppose they would show her much mercy if she stood in the way of their schemes," he said to himself. "His brother's death makes this young Fairfax a very decent match. The property must be worth five or six thousand a year--five or six thousand. I wonder what Daniel Granger's income is? Nearer fifty thousand than five, if I may believe what I have been told." Mr. Granger and his daughter called at Mill Cottage next day: the fair Sophia with a somewhat unwilling aspect, though she was decently civil to Mr. and Miss Lovel. She had protested against the flagrant breach of etiquette in calling on people who had just dined with her, instead of waiting until those diners had discharged their obligation by calling on her; but in vain. Her father had brought her to look at some of Clarissa's sketches, he told his friends.