nevertheless, to me, which seemed to accompany his lightest words, and to hang about his most familiar manner.  This, however, was no just reason for my secretly disliking and distrusting him as I did.  Ida said as much to me, I remember, when I confessed to her what my feelings toward him were, and tried (but vainly) to induce her to be equally candid with me in return.  She seemed to shrink from the tacit condemnation of Rosamond’s opinion which such a confidence on her part would have implied.  And yet she watched the growth of that opinion—­or, in other words, the growth of her sister’s liking for the baron—­with an apprehension and sorrow which she tried fruitlessly to conceal.  Even her father began to notice that her spirits were not so good as usual, and to suspect the cause of her melancholy.  I remember he jested, with all the dense insensibility of a stupid man, about Ida having invariably been jealous, from a child, if Rosamond looked kindly upon anybody except her elder sister.

The spring began to get far advanced toward summer.  Franval paid a visit to London; came back in the middle of the season to Glenwith Grange; wrote to put off his departure for France; and at last (not at all to the surprise of anybody who was intimate with the Welwyns) proposed to Rosamond, and was accepted.  He was candor and generosity itself when the preliminaries of the marriage-settlement were under discussion.  He quite overpowered Mr. Welwyn and the lawyers with references, papers, and statements of the distribution and extent of his property, which were found to be perfectly correct.  His sisters were written to, and returned the most cordial answers; saying that the state of their health would not allow them to come to England for the marriage; but adding a warm invitation to Normandy for the bride and her family.  Nothing, in short, could be more straightforward and satisfactory than the baron’s behavior, and the testimonies to his worth and integrity which the news of the approaching marriage produced from his relatives and his friends.

The only joyless face at the Grange now was Ida’s.  At any time it would have been a hard trial to her to resign that first and foremost place which she had held since childhood in her sister’s heart, as she knew she must resign it when Rosamond married.  But, secretly disliking and distrusting Franval as she did, the thought that he was soon to become the husband of her beloved sister filled her with a vague sense of terror which she could not explain to herself; which it was imperatively necessary that she should conceal; and which, on those very accounts, became a daily and hourly torment to her that was almost more than she could bear.