"But I do say it. A man may assure himself that he will find for himself a wife who shall be learned, or beautiful, or six feet high, if he wishes it, or who has red hair, or red eyes, or red cheeks,—just what he pleases; and he may go about till he finds it, as you can go about and match your worsteds. You are a fool if you buy a colour you don't want. But we can never match our worsteds for that other piece of work, but are obliged to take any colour that comes,—and, therefore, it is that we make such a jumble of it! Here's mamma. We must not be philosophical before her. Mamma, Major Grantly has—skedaddled."
"Oh, Lily, what a word!"
"But, oh, mamma, what a thing! Fancy his going away and not saying a word to anybody!"
"If he had anything to say to Grace, I suppose he said it."
"He asked her to marry him, of course. We none of us had any doubt about that. He swore to her that she and none but she should be his wife,—and all that kind of thing. But he seems to have done it in the most prosaic way;—and now he has gone away without saying a word to any of us. I shall never speak to him again,—unless Grace asks me."
"Grace, my dear, may I congratulate you?" said Mrs. Dale.
Grace did not answer, as Lily was too quick for her. "Oh, she has refused him, of course. But Major Grantly is a man of too much sense to expect that he should succeed the first time. Let me see; this is the fourteenth. These clocks run fourteen days, and, therefore, you may expect him again about the twenty-eighth. For myself, I think you are giving him an immense deal of unnecessary trouble, and that if he left you in the lurch it would only serve you right; but you have the world with you, I'm told. A girl is supposed to tell a man two fibs before she may tell him one truth."
"I told him no fib, Lily. I told him that I would not marry him, and I will not."
"But why not, dear Grace?" said Mrs. Dale.
"Because the people say that papa is a thief!" Having said this, Grace walked slowly out of the room, and neither Mrs. Dale nor Lily attempted to follow her.