‘My brothers are workmen.’

’Manufacture is the single vocation in which a man’s prospects may be said to be illimitable.  Hee-hee!—­they may buy me up before they die!  And now what stands in the way?  It would take fifty alliances with fifty families so little disreputable as yours, darling, to drag mine down.’

Ethelberta had anticipated the scene, and settled her course; what had to be said and done here was mere formality; yet she had been unable to go straight to the assent required.  However, after these words of self-depreciation, which were let fall as much for her own future ease of conscience as for his present warning, she made no more ado.

‘I shall think it a great honour to be your wife,’ she said simply.

39.  Knollsea—­Melchester

The year was now moving on apace, but Ethelberta and Picotee chose to remain at Knollsea, in the brilliant variegated brick and stone villa to which they had removed in order to be in keeping with their ascending fortunes.  Autumn had begun to make itself felt and seen in bolder and less subtle ways than at first.  In the morning now, on coming downstairs, in place of a yellowish-green leaf or two lying in a corner of the lowest step, which had been the only previous symptoms around the house, she saw dozens of them playing at corkscrews in the wind, directly the door was opened.  Beyond, towards the sea, the slopes and scarps that had been muffled with a thick robe of cliff herbage, were showing their chill grey substance through the withered verdure, like the background of velvet whence the pile has been fretted away.  Unexpected breezes broomed and rasped the smooth bay in evanescent patches of stippled shade, and, besides the small boats, the ponderous lighters used in shipping stone were hauled up the beach in anticipation of the equinoctial attack.

A few days after Ethelberta’s reception at Enckworth, an improved stanhope, driven by Lord Mountclere himself, climbed up the hill until it was opposite her door.  A few notes from a piano softly played reached his ear as he descended from his place:  on being shown in to his betrothed, he could perceive that she had just left the instrument.  Moreover, a tear was visible in her eye when she came near him.

They discoursed for several minutes in the manner natural between a defenceless young widow and an old widower in Lord Mountclere’s position to whom she was plighted—­a great deal of formal considerateness making itself visible on her part, and of extreme tenderness on his.  While thus occupied, he turned to the piano, and casually glanced at a piece of music lying open upon it.  Some words of writing at the top expressed that it was the composer’s original copy, presented by him, Christopher Julian, to the author of the song.  Seeing that he noticed the sheet somewhat lengthily, Ethelberta remarked that it had been an offering made to her a long time ago—­a melody written to one of her own poems.