'm sorry as though she were my own sister,"
said Anne. "But, Annabella, I want to speak to you especially."

"To me, in private?"

"Yes, to you; in private, if Grace won't mind?"

Then Grace prepared to go. But as she was going, Miss Anne, upon
whose brow a heavy burden of thought was lying, stopped her suddenly.
"Grace, my dear," she said, "go upstairs into your room, will
you?--not across the hall to the school."

"And why shouldn't she go to the school?" said Miss Prettyman.

Miss Anne paused for a moment, and then answered,--unwillingly,
as though driven to make a reply which she knew to be indiscreet.
"Because there is somebody in the hall."

"Go to your room, dear," said Miss Prettyman. And Grace went to her
room, never turning an eye down towards the hall. "Who is it?" said
Miss Prettyman.

"Major Grantly is here, asking to see you," said Miss Anne.

CHAPTER VII

Miss Prettyman's Private Room

[Illustration]

Major Grantly, when threatened by his father with pecuniary
punishment, should he demean himself by such a marriage as that he
had proposed to himself, had declared that he would offer his hand
to Miss Crawley on the next morning. This, however, he had not done.
He had not done it, partly because he did not quite believe his
father's threat, and partly because he felt that that threat was
almost justified,--for the present moment,--by the circumstances
in which Grace Crawley's father had placed himself. Henry Grantly
acknowledged, as he drove himself home on the morning after his
dinner at the rectory, that in this matter of his marriage he did owe
much to his family. Should he marry at all, he owed it to them to
marry a lady. And Grace Crawley,--so he told himself,--was a lady.
And he owed it to them to bring among them as his wife a woman who
should not disgrace him or them by her education, manners, or even by
her personal appearance. In all these respects Grace Crawley was, in
his judgment, quite as good as they had a right to expect her to be,
and in some respects a great deal superior to that type of womanhood
with which they had been most generally conversant. "If everybody had
her due, my sister isn't fit to hold a candle to her," he said to
himself. It must be acknowledged, therefore, that he was really in
love with Grace Crawley; and he declared to himself, over and over
again, that his family had no right to demand that he should marry a
woman with money. The archdeacon's so