hat it was in his power to marry
either of the girls as soon as he chose to intimate his choice; and in
the mean time he found it very agreeable to maintain a kind of mental
possibility of future proprietorship of them both.

And thus the pleasant life ran on in the most agreeable absorption and
abstraction from the world outside. "Don't ask any one else; why should
we have any one else?" they all said, except Janey, who had condescended
to appear in the evening in her best frock, though she was not admitted
at dinner, and who thought a few additional guests, and a round game now
and then, would be delightful variations upon the ordinary programme;
but the others did not agree with her. They became more and more
intimate, mingling the brother and sister relationship with a something
unnamed, unexpressed, which gave a subtle flavour to their talks and
flirtations. In that incipient stage of love-making this process is very
pleasant even to the spectators, full of little excitements and
surprises, and sharp stings of momentary quarrel, and great revolutions,
done with a single look, which are infinitely amusing to the lookers-on.
The house became a real domestic centre, thought of by each and all with
tender sentiment, such as made its owners somewhat proud of it, they
could scarcely tell why. Even Mr. May felt a certain complacence in the
fact that the young men were so fond of the Parsonage, and when he heard
complaints of the coldness and dullness of domestic intercourse, smiled,
and said that he did not feel it so, with that pleasant sense of
something superior in himself to cause this difference, which is sweet
to the greatest Stoic; for he was not as yet enlightened as to the
entire indifference of the little circle to any charm in him, and would
have been utterly confounded had any one told him that to the grave and
reflective Northcote, whom he had treated with such magnanimous charity,
binding him (evidently) by bonds of gratitude to himself for ever, it
was little Ursula, and not her father, who was the magnet of attraction.
Mr. May was a clever man, and yet it had not occurred to him that any
comparison between his own society and that of Ursula was possible.
Ursula! a child! He would have laughed aloud at the thought.

But all this pleasant society, though father and daughter both agreed
that it cost nothing, for what is a cake and a cup of tea? and the late
dinners and the extra maid, and the additional fires