diamonds, or grown-up jewels; but the turquoises are the very thing for you. He sees your taste. If he were not Lord Stanton, just for simple suitableness you should marry Geoff--he is the very person for you.” “I do not see why I should be made to marry any one for simple suitableness, as if I were a baby,” was Laura’s protestation; but she liked the turquoises, and she did not dislike the hints and smiling gossip. And when young Lord Stanton and his mother went away, the house regretted them from the highest to the lowest. The little girls stood behind backs, crying, when the carriage drove away. “I should like to know what they have to cry about,” Lydia said; “what is Geoff to them? It is such nonsense; but they always are encouraged in everything. You two little things, stop that, and be off with you! You are always in some one’s way.” “He is as much our cousin as yours,” said Fanny, who was always known to be saucy; but they skimmed away in a panic when Lydia turned round upon them, not knowing what she might do. “Oh, how nice it would be to have nothing but a mamma!” they said to each other as they alighted in her room, where it was always quiet, and smoothed down their ruffled plumes. Poor little doves! it was not for Geoff alone they were crying, for Geoff’s mother had been very good to them. They had hung about her for hours, and had stories told to them, and the world seemed an empty sort of place when these two visitors went away. The mother and son drove home to their own house, he a little sorry, she a little glad. It was wrong perhaps to be glad, implying a kind of tacit censure on the people she had left; but there was no harm in being happy to get home. Stanton Hall was not an immemorial place like Penninghame, nor a cosy unpretending country house like Elfdale, but a great mansion intended to be grand and splendid, and overawe the country. The splendour had fallen into a little disuse during Geoff’s long minority, but as he had lived chiefly at home with his mother, it had proportionately gained in comfort and the home aspect which only being lived in can give to a house. They lived chiefly in one wing, leaving the state part of the mansion almost unoccupied. Geoff had not been brought up as most youths of his age are brought up. His mother had been too timorous, both physically and spiritually, to trust her child amid all the appalling dangers and indulgences of a public school. And he had not even, more wonderful still, gone to any university. She was his sole guardian, no one sharing her powers, for it never had been supposed that little Geoff would be anybody in particular, or that it was of the least importance how his mother brought him up. His education had therefore been chiefly conducted at home by a tutor, chosen rather for his goodness than his learning. Did it matter very much? Geoff was not very clever, and it does not require much learning, as Mrs.