t her even yet.

"I see," he said at last. "I understand. Well, Miss Rowley, I quite
perceive that I cannot press my suit any further now. But I shall not
despair altogether. I know this, that if I might possibly succeed, I
should be a very happy man. Good-bye, Miss Rowley."

She took his offered hand and pressed it so warmly, that had he not
been manly and big-hearted, he would have taken such pressure as a
sign that she wished him to ask her again. But such was his nature.

"God bless you," he said, "and make you happy, whatever you may
choose to do."

Then he left her, and she heard him walk down the stairs with heavy
slow steps, and she thought that she could perceive from the sound
that he was sad at heart, but that he was resolved not to show his
sadness outwardly.

When she was alone she began to think in earnest of what she had
done. If the reader were told that she regretted the decision which
she had been forced to make so rapidly, a wrong impression would
be given of the condition of her thoughts. But there came upon her
suddenly a strange capacity for counting up and making a mental
inventory of all that might have been hers. She knew,--and where is
the girl so placed that does not know?--that it is a great thing to
be an English peeress. Now, as she stood there thinking of it all,
she was Nora Rowley without a shilling in the world, and without a
prospect of a shilling. She had often heard her mother speak fearful
words of future possible days, when colonial governing should no
longer be within the capacity of Sir Marmaduke. She had been taught
from a very early age that all the material prosperity of her life
must depend on matrimony. She could never be comfortably disposed of
in the world, unless some fitting man who possessed those things of
which she was so bare, should wish to make her his wife. Now there
had come a man so thoroughly fitting, so marvellously endowed, that
no worldly blessing would have been wanting. Mr. Glascock had more
than once spoken to her of the glories of Monkhams. She thought of
Monkhams now more than she had ever thought of the place before.
It would have been a great privilege to be the mistress of an old
time-honoured mansion, to call oaks and elms her own, to know that
acres of gardens were submitted to her caprices, to look at herds
of cows and oxen, and be aware that they lowed on her own pastures.
And to have been the mother of a future peer of England, to
have th