"You've broken out into such cleverness, my lad, that you should certainly now be trusted to make your own!" Mrs. Midmore returned, the brightness of her dignity suffering a little, Ralph could see, yet being put to no great pains to carry itself off as untouched. "Should you wish to see poor Nan at once," she remarked to her visitor, "we can easily send for her by the coach, and then you can judge of what she costs me at least to keep!" "Why don't you rather propose that he shall take the coach himself if it's such a cruelty to them to wait?" Molly asked of her mother, but rolling her fine eyes at Ralph in a manner that helped for the moment to make him feel more astray than any challenge to his perception had yet succeeded in doing. "So near a relation needn't fear any gossip, so that if you pay her a visit there it isn't I, sir," she laughed, "who shall feel a penny the worse. What in the world should my little sister be but his little sister too?--making it a new big brother, for herself, who may strike her indeed as a better fortune, not to call it even a better brother, than any she now can boast of. If you really want to go at once," she kept on to Ralph, and dropping him the smartest curtsey with it, "I'll trust you to come back to me in time--in time to marry me, I mean," she cried; "and I don't mind telling you that if you shouldn't I'd make no scruple of going to bring you. Nan is the nicest little body, and, with the gardener's wife to help, would make you, I think, comfortable enough."