y own life is settled now. I can't marry
Enid and, of course, I'll marry no one else. I shall do as you have
often advised me to do--take Orders and do the work that God puts
nearest to my hand. I know that the governor will agree with me when I
put it to him in that way. But then there's some one else."

"Your sister, you mean," said Ernshaw.

"My half----"

"Your sister, I said," Ernshaw interrupted, quickly. "Well, what about
her?"

"It's this way," continued Vane, somewhat awkwardly, "you see--of
course, as you say, she is my sister in a way, but she has absolutely
refused everything that the governor and I have offered her. We even
asked her to come and live with us, we offered, in short, to acknowledge
her as one of the family."

"And what did she say to that?"

"She simply refused. She said that she had not made her life, but that
she was ready to take it as it is. She said that she wasn't responsible
for the world as it's made, she'd never owed anyone a shilling since
she left her mother--and mine--and she never intended to. We tried
everything with her, really we did, and, of course, the governor did a
great deal more than I did, but it wasn't a bit of use. It's a horrible
business altogether, isn't it?"

"On the contrary, it is anything but that," replied Ernshaw, slowly and
deliberately as though he were considering each word as he uttered it.
"Maxwell, you have just decided to take Orders. I made up my mind to do
that long ago. We are both of us fairly well off. I have eight or nine
hundred a year of my own, and I daresay you have more, so we can go and
do our work without troubling about the loaves and fishes."

"Yes," replied Vane, "certainly, but that's not quite answering my
question, old fellow:--I mean about Carol."

"Quite so," he replied, "because I am going to ask you another. Do you
think you know me and like me well enough to have me for a
brother-in-law?"

"Good Heavens, you don't mean _that_, Ernshaw, do you?"

"I do," he said, "that is if she likes me well enough. Of course, I
haven't seen her yet, and she might refuse me; but from all that you've
told me about her, I'm half in love with her already, and--well, we
needn't say anything more about that just now. Take me up to Town with
you after Commem., introduce me to her and leave the rest to me and her.
If ever a girl was made for the wife of such a man as I hope to be some
day, that girl, Maxwell, is your sister."

"But, Erns