been sufficiently frank about Alice since he's been here." Her
husband smoked on. "His father seems to have taken up the business from
the artistic side, and Mr. Mavering won't be expected to enter into
the commercial part at once. If it wasn't for Alice, I don't believe he
would think of the business for a moment; he would study law. Of course
it's a little embarrassing to have her engaged at once before she's seen
anything of society here, but perhaps it's all for the best, after all:
the main thing is that she should be satisfied, and I can see that
she's only too much so. Yes, she's very much taken with him; and I don't
wonder. He is charming."

It was not the first time that Mrs. Pasmer had reasoned in this round;
but the utterance of her thoughts seemed to throw a new light on them,
and she took a courage from them that they did not always impart. She
arrived at the final opinion expressed, with a throb of tenderness for
the young fellow whom she believed eager to take her daughter from her,
and now for the first time she experienced a desolation in the prospect,
as if it were an accomplished fact. She was morally a bundle of
finesses, but at the bottom of her heart her daughter was all the world
to her. She had made the girl her idol, and if, like some other heathen,
she had not always used her idol with the greatest deference, if she
had often expected the impossible from it, and made it pay for her
disappointment, still she had never swerved from her worship of it. She
suddenly asked herself, What if this young fellow, so charming and so
good, should so wholly monopolise her child that she should no longer
have any share in her? What if Alice, who had so long formed her first
care and chief object in life, should contentedly lose herself in the
love and care of another, and both should ignore her right to her? She
answered herself with a pang that this might happen with any one Alice
married, and that it would be no worse, at the worst, with Dan Mavering
than with another, while her husband remained impartially silent. Always
keeping within the lines to which his wife's supremacy had driven him,
he felt safe there, and was not to be easily coaxed out of them.

Mrs. Pasmer rose and left him, with his perfect acquiescence, and went
into her daughter's room. She found Alice there, with a pretty evening
dress laid out on her bed. Mrs. Pasmer was very fond of that dress, and
at the thought of Alice in it her spirits