"I cannot say that," said the Vicar, with a wavering smile at the childishness of the proposition. And as the idea struck him, he looked keenly at her again. "Child, is this really what you suppose it? Do you care so much for Marmaduke that you are prepared to be his wife? You have been thrown together, you have no experience to guide you, you have seen nothing of the world. I ought to take you about and show you other places," he added in grave bewilderment. Marion, who had been going to the door, turned round and laughed. "It is too late now, papa." Too late! And he had been thinking of her life as a smooth, untrodden meadow! Outside, in a spot of cool shade under the cedar, Mrs Miles was sitting and working placidly at some little white squares, which never seemed to grow nearer their completion. The Vicar, after looking at her for a moment from his window, went out into the hall, through the porch, and across the grass-plot to her side. It was very rarely that he carried any problems to his wife; but it now appeared to him that there were certain complications, such as the white intricacies lying upon her lap, which it might be given only to a feminine understanding to disentangle. He sat down gravely by her side, looking with abstraction at the sunshine falling pleasantly on the house and the fine old tower beyond, and listening, perhaps, to the hum of the bees, or the rough rhythm which came from a saw-pit in the lane. Mrs Miles only looked up and smiled, and went on with her knitting, believing the Vicar to be absorbed in the Sunday sermons which she held to be the great events of Thorpe life. These, although never weak, ran a risk of being considered by a critic as rather dry and lengthy, but loyal wifehood excited a most earnest admiration in Mrs Miles. She knitted softly, therefore, lest the click of her needles should interfere with the roll of his ideas, and in the hush of the sweet summer afternoon a pleasant drowsiness was creeping over her, when her husband startled her by asking abruptly,-- "Wife, how old is Marion?" "Marion, my dear?" said Mrs Miles, with a perplexed conviction that the Vicar must have meant some other person more nearly connected with his sermon,--"Marion was twenty last month. Don't you remember we had a junket on her birthday, and it was the first time Sarah quite succeeded in it?" "Twenty!" repeated Mr Miles with a little groan. "I believed her to have been sixteen." "My dear! And dining out as she does, and so admired." "Well, well," said the Vicar in a moment or two, "it is no fault of yours or hers. But tell me whether you understood that Marmaduke was serious in his attachment to her?" "Why not?" asked Mrs Miles, a little motherly indignation making itself heard in her voice. "Why not?" repeated her husband, standing up and looking down on her, impatiently. "They are both children."