plump, white hand, while gravely
listening to Everett's brief statement of what he had already done, and
what were his plans for the future.

"You will sell Hazlewood, pay your father's debts, and begin life on
your own account, by going to Canada and becoming a merchant's clerk!"
She then recapitulated his plans in a sharp, pitiless tone. "Very well!
and we have only to bid you good-bye and wish you success. Is it so? For
it appears to me that my daughter is left entirely out of your
calculations, and very properly so. You cannot, as a merchant's clerk on
a hundred a year, marry Rosa Beauchamp, I presume."

"No," Everett said, steadily, and holding her, as it were, with his
earnest eyes, "I cannot have Rosa for my wife till I am able to give her
a home worthy of her; but you will not refuse to sanction our engagement
during the years in which I shall work for that home?"

Lady Beauchamp tapped the table with her fingers in an ominous manner.

"Long engagements are most unsatisfactory, silly, not to say dangerous
things. They never end well. No man ought to wish so to bind a young
girl, unless he has a reasonable chance of soon being in a position to
marry her. Now I ask you, have _you_ such a chance? If you go to Canada,
it may be years before you return. Just look at the thing in a
common-sense light, and tell me, can you expect my daughter to wait an
indefinite time, while you go to seek and make your fortune?"

She looked at him with an air of bland candor, while thus appealing to
his "common sense." Everett's aspect remained unchanged, however, in its
calm steadfastness.

"I would not bind her," he said, "unless she herself felt it would be a
comfort and a help, in some sort, during the weary years of separation,
so to be bound. And that she does feel it, you know, Lady Beauchamp."

"My dear Sir, you are not talking reasonably," she rejoined,
impatiently. "A young girl like Rosa, in love for the first time, of
course wishes to be bound, as you say, to the object of her first love.
But it would be doing her a cruel injustice to take her at her word.
Surely you feel that? It is very true, she might not forget you for six
months, or more, perhaps. But, in the course of time, as she enters on
life and sees more of the world and of people, it is simply impossible
that she should remain constant to a dreamy attachment to some one
thousands of miles away. She would inevitably wish to form other ties;
and then the