‘This room must have been made on purpose for Miss Severn, who plays,’ she said. ‘I should think anybody who was musical would be in paradise here. There is the organ and the piano, and in that closet there are harps, and sackbuts, and dulcimers, and all kinds of music. I shall ask Alice Severn to come to see me, and Mr. Frank Renton shall come too, and hear her--play.’ ‘I ask no better,’ said Frank, responding to the challenge as became a Guardsman. And Nelly took them down-stairs, leaving the two graver, pre-occupied men to follow, and making Frank her partner by some subtle sleight of hand. He was very much at home at Richmont before the day was over. Even Laurie remarked the rising flirtation, and laughed to himself in the midst of his own excitement at the possibility of his brother’s fortune coming in so easy a way. And his friends congratulated him on his success, and pledged him in bumpers when they got home. ‘I tell you, my boy, she has cartloads of tin,’ said Edgbaston. ‘Better that than going out to India.’ And as for Frank, he did not deny to himself that on the whole, notwithstanding Laurie’s undignified aspect, and Mr. Rich’s soap-boiling, or cheesemongering--which was it?--he had spent a very pleasant day. CHAPTER X. BROTHERLY ADVICE. Next day, however, Frank Renton was full of many thoughts. I doubt whether it is in my power to give any clear impression of the reflections naturally produced in a young man’s mind by the first suggestion of marrying money. In ordinary cases, marriage is not the object set before the youth--the purpose contemplated from the beginning of an acquaintance. He is attracted by some stranger, whose name he never heard before, perhaps, and of whose existence, previous to the eventful hour which brought them together, he had no knowledge. Chance or inclination brings them together. Then the germ warms, quickens, bursts into flower. Love comes spontaneous, unsought, perhaps almost unwelcome, and marriage becomes but a necessary accident in its course. But to approach that idea of marriage in cold blood, and without any soft compulsion of feeling, is a very different matter. It is a thing which women are called upon to do every day; but it is not so inevitable among men. It had been brought before Frank in what seemed a very distinct way. True, Nelly Rich was a little flirt, almost confessedly avenging herself on the world for her father’s uncomfortable position, and the spurns her family endured, by doing as much harm as she could among the men who ate Mr. Rich’s dinners and laughed at him. She had no mercy upon them, and more than one, within the knowledge even of the battalion at Royalborough, who had supposed themselves sure of Nelly and her fortune, had been ignominiously turned off when the crisis came. This very fact naturally made Frank think the more of the impression, which all his comrades informed him he had produced. Fifty