s may suit your convenience, and in the event of your
accepting the offer,--which I sincerely trust that you
may be enabled to do,--I shall hope to have an early
opportunity of seeing you, with reference to your
institution to the parish.

Allow me also to say to you and Mrs. Crawley that, if
we have been correctly informed as to that other event
to which I have alluded, we both hope that we may have
an early opportunity of making ourselves personally
acquainted with the parents of a young lady who is to
be so dear to us. As I have met your daughter, I may
perhaps be allowed to send her my kindest love. If, as my
daughter-in-law, she comes up to the impression which she
gave me at our first meeting, I, at any rate, shall be
satisfied.

I have the honour to be, my dear sir,
Your most faithful servant,

THEOPHILUS GRANTLY.

This letter the archdeacon had shown to his wife, by whom it had not
been very warmly approved. Nothing, Mrs. Grantly had said, could be
prettier than what the archdeacon had said about Grace. Mrs. Crawley,
no doubt, would be satisfied with that. But Mr. Crawley was such a
strange man! "He will be stranger than I take him to be if he does
not accept St Ewold's," said the archdeacon. "But in offering it,"
said Mrs. Grantly, "you have not a said a word of your own high
opinion of his merits." "I have not a very high opinion of them,"
said the archdeacon. "Your father had, and I have said so. And as I
have the most profound respect for your father's opinion in such a
matter, I have permitted that to overcome my own hesitation." This
was pretty from the husband to the wife as it regarded her father,
who had now gone from them; and, therefore, Mrs. Grantly accepted it
without further argument. The reader may probably feel assured that
the archdeacon had never, during their joint lives, acted in any
church matter upon the advice given to him by Mr. Harding; and it was
probably the case also that the living would have been offered to
Mr. Crawley, if nothing had been said by Mr. Harding on the subject;
but it did not become Mrs. Grantly even to think of all this. The
archdeacon, having made this gracious speech about her father, was
not again asked to alter his letter. "I suppose he will accept it,"
said Mrs. Grantly. "I should think that he probably may," said the
archdeacon.

So Grace, knowing what was the purport of the letter, sat with it
betwe