When she was alone Mrs. Ashurst pondered long and earnestly over what she had just heard. Of course, the question of Marian's future--and to her parents as well as herself the future of every girl means her marriage--had been often thought of by her mother. She and her dead husband had talked of it in the summer evenings after supper and before retiring to rest, the only time which the school-work left for James Ashurst to devote to himself, and even then he was generally rather fatigued with past, or preoccupied with growing work. It was very general, the talk between them, and principally carried on by Mrs. Ashurst; she had wondered when Marian would marry, and whom; she had gone through the list of eligible young men in the neighbourhood, and had speculated on their incomes and their chances of being thrown with Marian in such little company as they kept. She had wondered how they at home would be able to get on without her; whether she herself would be able to undertake the domestic superintendence, as she had done in the old days before Marian was of an age to be useful; whether Marian would not settle somewhere near, where she might still take an interest in her old work, and many other odd and profitless speculations, to which the dominie would give an affirmative or negative grunt or comment, wondering all the while how he was to meet that acceptance which he had given to Barlow, and which became due on the twenty-seventh, or whether his old college chum Smith, now a flourishing physician in Cheltenham, would lend him the fifty pounds for which he had made so earnest an appeal. But all this seemed years ago to Mrs. Ashurst as she thought of it. For many months before her husband's death the subject had not been mooted between them; the cold calm external impassibility, and the firm determination of Marian's character, seemed to her mother to mark her for one of those women destined by nature to be single, and therefore somewhat fitted for the condition. A weak woman herself, and with scarcely any perception of character, believing that nearly all women were made in the same mould and after the same type, Mrs. Ashurst could not understand the existence of the volcano under the placid surface. Only gushing, giggling, blushing girls fulfilled her idea of loving women, or women lovable by men. Marian was so "odd" and "strange," so determined, so strong-minded, that she never seemed to think of love-making, nor indeed, her mother thought, had she been ever so much that way disposed, would she have had any time for it.