,--had, after a fashion,
perceived her wisdom,--and had regarded himself as a man free to
decide, without disgrace, that he might abandon ideas of ecstatic
love and look out for a rich wife. Presuming himself to be reticent
for the future in reference to his darling Lucy, he might do as he
pleased with himself. Thus there had come a moment in which he had
determined that he would ask his rich cousin to marry him. In that
little project he had been interrupted, and the reader knows what
had come of it. Lord Fawn's success had not in the least annoyed
him. He had only half resolved in regard to his cousin. She was very
beautiful no doubt, and there was her income;--but he also knew that
those teeth would bite and that those claws would scratch. But Lord
Fawn's success had given a turn to his thoughts, and had made him
think, for a moment, that if a man loved, he should be true to his
love. The reader also knows what had come of that,--how at last he
had not been reticent. He had not asked Lucy to be his wife; but he
had said that which made it impossible that he should marry any other
woman without dishonour.

As he thought of what he had done himself, he tried to remember
whether Lucy had said a word expressive of affection for himself.
She had in truth spoken very few words, and he could remember almost
every one of them. "Have I?"--she had asked, when he told her that
she had ever been the princess reigning in his castles. And there had
been a joy in the question which she had not attempted to conceal.
She had hesitated not at all. She had not told him that she loved
him. But there had been something sweeter than such protestation in
the question she had asked him. "Is it indeed true," she had said,
"that I have been placed there where all my joy and all my glory
lies?" It was not in her to tell a lie to him, even by a tone. She
had intended to say nothing of her love, but he knew that it had all
been told. "Have I?"--he repeated the words to himself a dozen times,
and as he did so, he could hear her voice. Certainly there never was
a voice that brought home to the hearer so strong a sense of its own
truth!

Why should he not at once make up his mind to marry her? He could
do it. There was no doubt of that. It was possible for him to alter
the whole manner of his life, to give up his clubs,--to give up even
Parliament, if the need to do so was there,--and to live as a married
man on the earnings of his profession. T