"Let your consent depend upon Richard's constancy, and then I shall be secure," answered Marion, with a playful smile. "He shall be at liberty to change his mind on a moment's notice; but, in the mean time, Patrick, I have a great idea that he will continue always the same; and be assured that I certainly shall."
"Pshaw! nonsense, Marion! You never could be satisfied with the stupid sort of happiness to be found in a hum-drum parsonage. Give me no more of your love-in-a-cottage ideas, when I know you have a chance of—of, no matter who! somebody worth a dozen Mr. Granvilles, and who could buy him up a hundred times over."
"One Mr. Granville is quite enough," replied Marion, smiling. "If he were like the Emperor of China, cousin-german to the stars, and uncle to the moon, I could not think more of him. Riches are only to be valued for the use people make of them, but he is 'more bent to raise the wretched than to rise.' Very little is essential, Patrick, 'when humble happiness endears each scene;' and nothing more is indispensable to me than to be so loved by one who is deserving of my love in return. How much rather I would live with a poor man who is liberal, than with a rich man who is avaricious; and Richard's wealth, though not great, is furnished with wings to fly away on a thousand embassies of mercy and liberality."
"I wish mine had wings to come, instead of to go; but say what you will, it bores me to hear of Granville, he is so absurdly different from everybody else."
"So much the worse for everybody else," observed Marion, with a good-humored smile. "Is that the blackest count in your indictment?"
"And bad enough, too! I'm told there's not a garret nor a dingy cellar-full of misery in the city, where Granville is not upon visiting terms. He is a perfect Humane Society in himself. I daresay he will receive a public dinner and a piece of plate from the beggars at last."
"Let me entreat, Marion," said Agnes, who had entered during the discussion, "that you will not be running about with those Granvilles, in search of typhus fever or small-pox. You really ought to be fumigated every time you return from these houses, where the people are all dying of dirt."
"When Lady Towercliffe recommended her husband's old castle in the country to me once, for the shooting, she finished the catalogue of its many perfections, by saying, 'and we have such very pleasant beggars!" observed Sir Patrick, laughing. "I should certainly have been tempted to bag a few brace of them! The Irish fellow whom you may remember besetting my door so long in Edinburgh, without extracting a sous, came up to me lately, in the coolest manner imaginable, and said, 'you must find another beggar, Sir Patrick, for the situation here is not worth keeping!' I gave the rascal half a sovereign for his humor, and never saw his face again."
"It is all very well, if beggars find us out, to give a trifle, and so get rid of their importunity," said Agnes, in her most benevolent accent, "but the idea of setting out on a crusade to find them out, is rather too amusing. I am immensely charitable, however, in referring cases of distress to my friends, but benevolence is the most expensive of all virtues to set up for."
"Better do too much than too little," replied Marion. "We must not suppose every man in want is either a knave or a fool, and no remembrance will last so long in our minds as the good we have done, or left undone, for we gain the highest happiness to ourselves by dispensing it to others. Yesterday, Mr. Granville relieved a poor man from actual starvation, nearly ninety years old."