"Wants to be what, did you say?"
"To be married, Aunt Bett," cried out the doctor. "It's the fashion, it seems, with the young folks nowadays! You were not in so great a hurry when you were young?"
The doctor spoke in no covert spirit of joking--as a stranger might have supposed, Miss Davenal being Miss Davenal still. Bettina Davenal had had her romance in life. In her young days, when she was not much older than Caroline, a poor curate had sought to make her his wife. She was greatly attached to him, but he was very, very poor, and prudence said, "Wait until better times shall come for him." Miss Bettina's father and mother were alive then; the latter a great invalid, and that also weighed with her, for in her duty and affection she did not like to leave her home. Ay, cold and unsympathising as she appeared to be now, Bettina Davenal had once been a warm, loving girl, an affectionate daughter. And so, by her own fiat, she waited and waited, and in her thirtieth year that poor curate, never promoted to be a richer one, had died--had died of bad air, and hard work, and poor nourishment. His duties were cast in the midst of one of our worst metropolitan localities; and they were heavy, and his stipend was small. From that time Bettina Davenal's disposition had changed; she grew cold, formal, hard: repentance, it was suspected, was ever upon her, that she had not risked the prudence and saved his life. Her own fortune added to what he earned, would at least have kept him from the ills of poverty.
"Who wants to marry her?" questioned Miss Davenal, when she could take her condemning eyes away from Caroline.
"Mark Cray."
The words seemed to mollify Miss Davenal in a slight degree, and her head relaxed a very little from its uprightness. "She might do worse, Richard. He is a good man, and I dare say he is making money. Those civil engineers get on well."
"I said Mark Cray, Aunt Bett," repeated the doctor.
"Mark! He won't do. He is only a boy. He has got neither house nor money."
"Just what I say," said the doctor. "I tell her they must wait."
"Mad! to be sure they must be mad, both of them," complaisantly acquiesced Miss Davenal.