Had John Musgrave had any idea of what floated through her busy brain while she smilingly confided to him some of her plans for the improvement of Moresby, he would have been horrified. Marriage was the one subject of all others he considered it indelicate to dwell upon. If people married they did it for some good reason; to contemplate the step impartially with, no adequate motive for so serious an undertaking was to him unthinkable. Had he ever reflected upon it, and attempted a portrait of the lady he might have honoured with his preference, it certainly would not have been a woman with any latent wickedness in her. John Musgrave's ideal, had he been called upon to embody an ideal, would have revealed the picture of a calm-faced woman of unemotional temperament, who would always have said and done the correct thing, would have adorned his home, and revered himself, and would have been in every sense of the word womanly. Mrs Chadwick could have told him that such a woman did not exist outside a man's imagination. She would not have done so, of course. She believed in encouraging masculine fallacies when they were harmless; to attempt discouragement was to invite defeat. Opposition is the least effective form of argument. A clever woman seldom makes the mistake of forcing her ideas; and Mrs Chadwick was undoubtedly clever. "Anything can be accomplished through suggestion," she had been heard to assert. "Suggestion, plant it where you will, is a seed which never fails to germinate." CHAPTER SIX. Miss Simpson contemplated her appearance by the aid of the long mirror in her wardrobe with an eye sharply critical as that of the vainest of her sisters, whose concern for outward things she held generally in contempt. But a visit to the house of a bachelor in regard to whom one entertains matrimonial intentions excuses, as anyone will acknowledge, a greater attentiveness to detail than usual. The result of her inspection was on the whole satisfactory. The effect of her severely tailored costume and small, unassertive hat was neat in the extreme, so neat, indeed, that Mrs Chadwick, when she beheld it, felt a womanly compassion for the wearer; she preferred to see a woman daintily gowned. But Mrs Chadwick's taste was not Moresby's. One lock of Miss Simpson's tightly braided hair betrayed a rebellious tendency to escape the hairpins and stray pleasingly over her brow. This could not be permitted. The aid of additional pins was requisitioned, and the unruly lock was brought into subjection, and tucked out of sight beneath the unrelenting brim of the eminently decorous hat.