want. But we can never match our worsteds for
that other piece of work, but are obliged to take any colour that
comes,--and therefore it is that we make such a jumble of it! Here's
mamma. We must not be philosophical before her. Mamma, Major Grantly
has--skedaddled."

"Oh, Lily, what a word!"

"But, oh, mamma, what a thing! Fancy his going away and not saying a
word to anybody!"

"If he had anything to say to Grace, I suppose he said it."

"He asked her to marry him, of course. We none of us had any doubt
about that. He swore to her that she and none but she should be his
wife,--and all that kind of thing. But he seems to have done it in
the most prosaic way;--and now he has gone away without saying a word
to any of us. I shall never speak to him again,--unless Grace asks
me."

"Grace, my dear, may I congratulate you?" said Mrs. Dale.

Grace did not answer, as Lily was too quick for her. "Oh, she has
refused him, of course. But, Major Grantly is a man of too much sense
to expect that he should succeed the first time. Let me see; this is
the fourteenth. These clocks run fourteen days, and, therefore, you
may expect him again about the twenty-eighth. For myself, I think you
are giving him an immense deal of unnecessary trouble, and that if he
left you in the lurch it would only serve you right; but you have the
world with you, I'm told. A girl is supposed to tell a man two fibs
before she may tell him one truth."

"I told him no fib, Lily. I told him that I would not marry him, and
I will not."

"But why not, dear Grace?" said Mrs. Dale.

"Because the people say that papa is a thief!" Having said this,
Grace walked slowly out of the room, and neither Mrs. Dale nor Lily
attempted to follow her.

"She's as good as gold," said Lily, when the door was closed.

"And he;--what of him?"

"I think he is good too; but she has told me nothing yet of what he
has said to her. He must be good, or he would not have come down
here after her. But I don't wonder at his coming, because she is so
beautiful! Once or twice as we were walking back to-day, I thought
her face was the most lovely that I had ever seen. And did you see
her just now, as she spoke of her father?"

"Oh, yes;--I saw her."

"Think what she will be in two or three years' time, when she becomes
a woman. She talks French, and Italian, and Hebrew for anything that
I know; and she is perfectly beautiful. I never saw a more lovely
figure;--and she has spi