"I'm very pleased indeed," she answered. "You never gave better advice than when you bade me write to him. The truth is that he's not made to marry. Tenor bell be enough wife for him." "I wonder who'll ring it when you're wedded," mused Nathan. "No man have touched that bell since my nephew took it up." "Time enough. Not that he'd mind ringing for me, I believe. Such a bloodless thing as he is really--no fight in him at all seemingly." "If you talk like that we shall begin to think you're sorry he took you at your word," said Mr. Baskerville; but Cora protested; and when he had gone, she spoke more openly to her mother. "'Tis a very merciful escape for me, and perhaps for him. I didn't understand my own mind; and since he's took it so wonderful cool, I guess he didn't know his mind either." "You haven't heard the last of him. I've met the like. For my part I'd rather hear he was daft and frantic than so calm and reasonable. 'Tis the sort that keep their trouble out of sight suffer most." "I'd have forgiven him everything but being a coward," declared Cora fiercely. "What's the use of a man that goes under the thumb of his father? If he'd said 'I hate my father, and I'll never see him again, and we'll run away and be married and teach him a lesson,' then I'd have respected him. But not a bit of it. And to take what I wrote like that! Not even to try and make me think better of it. A very poor-spirited chap." Mrs. Lintern smiled, not at the picture of Mark's sorrows, but at her daughter's suggestion, that she would have run away with the young man and married him and defied consequences. "How we fool ourselves," she said. "You think you would have run with him. You wouldn't have run a yard, Cora. The moment you found things was contrary with his father, you was off him--why? Because your first thought always is, and always has been, the main chance. You meant to marry him for his money--you and me know that very well, if none else does." The daughter showed no concern at this attack. "I shan't marry a pauper, certainly. My face is all the fortune you seem like to give me, and I'm not going to fling it away for nought. I do set store by money, and I do long to have some; and so do every other woman in her senses. The only difference between me and others is that they pretend money ban't everything, and I say it is, and don't pretend different." "Milly Luscombe be going to stick to Rupert Baskerville, however, though 'tis said his father will cut him off with a shilling if he leaves Cadworthy." Cora sniffed. "There'll be so much the more for the others then. They Baskerville fathers always seem to stand in the way of their sons when it comes to marrying. Mr. Nathan would have been different if he'd had a family. He understands the young generation. Not that Vivian Baskerville will object to Ned marrying, for Ned told me so."