"Roger!" exclaimed my grandmother, "surely you do not mean what you say! Of as much more!"
"Of precisely that money, my dear mother. I have taken a fancy to a young lady, and as I cannot marry her myself, I am determined to make her a good match, so far as money is concerned, for some one else."
"But why not marry her yourself?" I asked. "Older men than yourself marry every day."
"Ay, widowers, I grant you; they will marry until they are a thousand; but it is not so with us bachelors. Let a man once get fairly past forty, and it is no easy matter to bring him to the sacrifice. No, Jack Dunning's being here is the most fortunate thing in the world, and so I have set him at work to draw up a settlement on the young lady to whom I refer, without any rights to her future husband, let him turn out to be whom he may."
"It is Mary Warren!" exclaimed my sister, in a tone of delight.
My uncle smiled, and he tried to look demure; but I cannot say that he succeeded particularly well.
"It is—it is—it is Mary Warren, and uncle Ro means to give her a fortune!" added Patt, bounding across the floor like a young deer, throwing herself into her guardian's lap, hugging and kissing him as if she were nothing but a child, though a fine young woman of nineteen. "Yes, it is Mary Warren, and uncle Hodge is a delightful old gentleman—no, a delightful young gentleman, and were he only thirty years younger he should have his own heiress for a wife himself. Good, dear, generous, sensible uncle Ro. This is so like him, after all his disappointment; for I know, Hugh, his heart was set on your marrying Henrietta."
"And what has my marrying, or not marrying Henrietta, to do with this settlement of fifty thousand dollars on Miss Warren? The young ladies are not even connected, I believe."
"Oh! you know how all such things are managed," said Patt, blushing and laughing at the passing allusion to matrimony, even in another: "Mary Warren will not be Mary Warren always."
"Who will she be, then?" demanded uncle Ro, quickly.