“I think I would rather stay at home,” said she.

Dr Middleton rejoined:  “I would.”

“But I am not married yet papa.”

“As good, my dear.”

“A little change of scene, I thought . . .”

“We have accepted Willoughby’s invitation.  And he helps me to a house near you.”

“You wish to be near me, papa?”

“Proximate—­at a remove:  communicable.”

“Why should we separate?”

“For the reason, my dear, that you exchange a father for a husband.”

“If I do not want to exchange?”

“To purchase, you must pay, my child.  Husbands are not given for nothing.”

“No.  But I should have you, papa!”

“Should?”

“They have not yet parted us, dear papa.”

“What does that mean?” he asked, fussily.  He was in a gentle stew already, apprehensive of a disturbance of the serenity precious to scholars by postponements of the ceremony and a prolongation of a father’s worries.

“Oh, the common meaning, papa,” she said, seeing how it was with him.

“Ah!” said he, nodding and blinking gradually back to a state of composure, glad to be appeased on any terms; for mutability is but another name for the sex, and it is the enemy of the scholar.

She suggested that two weeks of Patterne would offer plenty of time to inspect the empty houses of the district, and should be sufficient, considering the claims of friends, and the necessity of going the round of London shops.

“Two or three weeks,” he agreed, hurriedly, by way of compromise with that fearful prospect.

CHAPTER VII

THE BETROTHED

During the drive from Upton to Patterne, Miss Middleton hoped, she partly believed, that there was to be a change in Sir Willoughby’s manner of courtship.  He had been so different a wooer.  She remembered with some half-conscious desperation of fervour what she had thought of him at his first approaches, and in accepting him.  Had she seen him with the eyes of the world, thinking they were her own?  That look of his, the look of “indignant contentment”, had then been a most noble conquering look, splendid as a general’s plume at the gallop.  It could not have altered.  Was it that her eyes had altered?

The spirit of those days rose up within her to reproach, her and whisper of their renewal:  she remembered her rosy dreams and the image she had of him, her throbbing pride in him, her choking richness of happiness:  and also her vain attempting to be very humble, usually ending in a carol, quaint to think of, not without charm, but quaint, puzzling.