“I was thinking chiefly,” Marion resumed with dignity, “of mamma. She will expect some society, and there will be none; just the Manse, and a house or two like that, scarcely genteel, not in Our Position. We might do very well, Archie and me, though it would be dull; but she will be expecting to go out to her dinner, and to be asked to parties, and show off all her grand gowns. And there will be nobody. And not even a shop to go to, to spend an hour in an afternoon. And you cannot always be looking at the view. It is mamma that I am thinking about,” Marion said. He did not again bid her not to speak of Evelyn so; for was it not the best thing he could hope for, that his child should think of his wife as of a mother? but his heart revolted all the same, and the girl’s commonplace prettiness, her little assured speech, even the undeniable sense that there was in her remarks, sense of the most prosaic kind, yet genuine enough in its way, exasperated him. He said dryly, “I think I can take my wife in my own hand.” “Yes,” said Marion; “but maybe it will be a great disappointment to her, when she knows that it is so bonnie a place and all that and then comes here, so far away, and finds that there is nothing but the view.” Sense! undeniably it was sense, in its petty, miserable way; and what if it might be true? After all, he had only known Evelyn on one side of her character. She was much superior to himself in a hundred ways. She had the habits of a life very different from his, the habits of good society, of knowing “the best people.” Rowland himself, in his rough practical way, had not a very profound admiration for the best people. There were even more bores among them, he thought, than among the most simple, and their views were not more elevated. But then Evelyn knew no other life than theirs, and to bring her down here to an unbroken solitude, or to the society of the sea-bathers, the people who came for “the salt water,” might perhaps be a dangerous experiment. A cold shiver ran over him, while his daughter prattled on in her cool precocious wisdom. How could he tell that she would be sufficiently compensated by “the view” as to forget everything else, or that she would be able to bear from morning to night the unbroken enjoyment of his own society, and of Marion and Archie? His mind went away into a close consideration of her previous life as far as he knew it. The society at the Station was perhaps not very choice, but it was abundant. The people there knew people whom she knew, were acquainted with her own antecedents, and the kind of life to which she had been accustomed, a life which he himself did not know much about, much less his daughter and his son. A woman brought up in a great country house, overflowing with company, such as people in humbler positions know only by books, accustomed to go up to town for the season, to make rounds of visits, etc., etc.--would not she