ments have shaken up
the classes like peas in a hopper. An annuity, and a comfortable
cottage--'

'My brothers are workmen.'

'Manufacture is the single vocation in which a man's prospects may be
said to be illimitable. Hee-hee!--they may buy me up before they die!
And now what stands in the way? It would take fifty alliances with fifty
families so little disreputable as yours, darling, to drag mine down.'

Ethelberta had anticipated the scene, and settled her course; what had to
be said and done here was mere formality; yet she had been unable to go
straight to the assent required. However, after these words of
self-depreciation, which were let fall as much for her own future ease of
conscience as for his present warning, she made no more ado.

'I shall think it a great honour to be your wife,' she said simply.

39. KNOLLSEA--MELCHESTER

The year was now moving on apace, but Ethelberta and Picotee chose to
remain at Knollsea, in the brilliant variegated brick and stone villa to
which they had removed in order to be in keeping with their ascending
fortunes. Autumn had begun to make itself felt and seen in bolder and
less subtle ways than at first. In the morning now, on coming
downstairs, in place of a yellowish-green leaf or two lying in a corner
of the lowest step, which had been the only previous symptoms around the
house, she saw dozens of them playing at corkscrews in the wind, directly
the door was opened. Beyond, towards the sea, the slopes and scarps that
had been muffled with a thick robe of cliff herbage, were showing their
chill grey substance through the withered verdure, like the background of
velvet whence the pile has been fretted away. Unexpected breezes broomed
and rasped the smooth bay in evanescent patches of stippled shade, and,
besides the small boats, the ponderous lighters used in shipping stone
were hauled up the beach in anticipation of the equinoctial attack.

A few days after Ethelberta's reception at Enckworth, an improved
stanhope, driven by Lord Mountclere himself, climbed up the hill until it
was opposite her door. A few notes from a piano softly played reached
his ear as he descended from his place: on being shown in to his
betrothed, he could perceive that she had just left the instrument.
Moreover, a tear was visible in her eye when she came near him.

They discoursed for several minutes in the manner natural between a
defenceless young widow and an old widower