was landed, the sooner another deacon
might be sent for who might be won by themselves. So quickly was all
managed that the two unreliable sisters were actually out of the house
before Theobald's next visit--which was on the Sunday following his
first.

This time Theobald felt quite at home in the house of his new friends--for
so Mrs Allaby insisted that he should call them. She took, she said,
such a motherly interest in young men, especially in clergymen. Theobald
believed every word she said, as he had believed his father and all his
elders from his youth up. Christina sat next him at dinner and played
her cards no less judiciously than she had played them in her sister's
bedroom. She smiled (and her smile was one of her strong points)
whenever he spoke to her; she went through all her little artlessnesses
and set forth all her little wares in what she believed to be their most
taking aspect. Who can blame her? Theobald was not the ideal she had
dreamed of when reading Byron upstairs with her sisters, but he was an
actual within the bounds of possibility, and after all not a bad actual
as actuals went. What else could she do? Run away? She dared not.
Marry beneath her and be considered a disgrace to her family? She dared
not. Remain at home and become an old maid and be laughed at? Not if
she could help it. She did the only thing that could reasonably be
expected. She was drowning; Theobald might be only a straw, but she
could catch at him and catch at him she accordingly did.

If the course of true love never runs smooth, the course of true match-
making sometimes does so. The only ground for complaint in the present
case was that it was rather slow. Theobald fell into the part assigned
to him more easily than Mrs Cowey and Mrs Allaby had dared to hope. He
was softened by Christina's winning manners: he admired the high moral
tone of everything she said; her sweetness towards her sisters and her
father and mother, her readiness to undertake any small burden which no
one else seemed willing to undertake, her sprightly manners, all were
fascinating to one who, though unused to woman's society, was still a
human being. He was flattered by her unobtrusive but obviously sincere
admiration for himself; she seemed to see him in a more favourable light,
and to understand him better than anyone outside of this charming family
had ever done. Instead of snubbing him as his father, brother and
sisters did,