_Morgana._ I do; sufficiently to derive great pleasure from it. Perhaps,
after this confession, you will not wonder that I am a spinster.

_Algernon._ So far, that I think it would tend to make you fastidious
in your choice. Not that you would be less sought by any who would be
worthy your attention. For I am told you have had many suitors, and have
rejected them all in succession. And have you not still many, and
among them one very devoted lover, who would bring you title as well as
fortune? A very amiable person, too, though not without a comic side to
his character.

_Morgana._ I do not well know. He so far differs from all my preceding
suitors that in every one of them I found the presence of some quality
that displeased me, or the absence of some which would have pleased me:
the want, in the one way or the other, of that entire congeniality in
taste and feeling which I think essential to happiness in marriage. He
has so strong a desire of pleasing, and such power of acquisition and
assimilation, that I think a woman truly attached to him might mould
him to her mind. Still, I can scarcely tell why, he does not complete
my idealities. They say, Love is his own avenger: and perhaps I shall be
punished by finding my idealities realised in one who will not care for
me.

_Algernon._ I take that to be impossible.

Morgana blushed, held down her head, and made no reply. Algernon looked
at her in silent admiration. A new light seemed to break in on him.
Though he had had so many opportunities of forming a judgment on the
point, it seemed to strike him for the first time with irresistible
conviction that he had never before heard such a sweet voice, nor seen
such an expressive and intelligent countenance. And in this way they
continued like two figures in a _tableau vivant,_ till the entrance
of other parties broke the spell which thus had fixed them in their
positions.

A few minutes more, and their destinies might have been irrevocably
fixed. But the interruption gave Mr. Falconer the opportunity of
returning again to his Tower, to consider, in the presence of the seven
sisters, whether he should not be in the position of a Roman, who was
reduced to the dilemma of migrating without his household deities, or of
suffering his local deities to migrate without him; and whether he could
sit comfortably on either of the horns of this dilemma. He felt that
he could not. On the other hand, could he bear to see the fascinatin