"Where?" repeats Sir Thomas, rather irritated at his son's obtuseness. "Why, here! not five yards off! in this very house!" Then, seeing him still look puzzled: "God bless my soul, sir! where are your wits to-day? How can you do better than Conny? That bit of land of hers down at Four Oaks dovetails into ours as neatly as possible; it seems as if it were intended by Providence," ends Sir Thomas, piously.
St. John gives a long, low whistle. "Conny!" he repeats, in unfeigned surprise. "I should as soon have thought of marrying my mother. Why, we have been like brother and sister all our lives."
"Fiddlesticks!" says Sir Thomas, gruffly. "She is no more your sister than I am. When I was young, if people were born brothers and sisters they called themselves so, and if they were not they did not. I hate your adopted brother and sister and father and motherhoods."
"Conny!" ejaculates St. John, again, reflectively.
The idea is thoroughly new, certainly, but it does not altogether displease him.
He is thinking of her approvingly, as the one woman whom, above all others, it would be impossible for him to love. After all, it is not a wife for him that is required; God knows, he has no desire for such an appendage; it is a mother for the heir to Felton that is wanted; and for that purpose she will do as well as another—better than most, indeed, being statelier, fairer, of better growth. If she can transmit to her progeny her own straight features, instead of Sir Thomas's bottle nose, or St. John's long nondescript one, so much the better for them.
"Well?" says Sir Thomas, impatiently, strutting up and down, with his hands under his green-coat tails.
"If she have no objection, neither have I; 'one woman is as good as another, if not better,' as the Irishman said," answers the young man, indifferently. "Well, Sir Thomas," rising and looking excessively bored, "I suppose I may go now, mayn't I? I promised Bellew to go down to the kennels with him, and as it is past twelve o'clock, I'm afraid my bliss cannot well be consummated to-day."
He wants an heir, and she wants diamonds, and so the bargain is struck.
"She is good to look at, and she does not pretend to care two straws about me—both causes for special thankfulness," he says to himself, with a sort of sardonic philosophy, after his decisive interview with his betrothed. "'On this day two years I married: Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.' Will Byron's summary of wedded felicity be mine also? Probably. I suppose one may think oneself tolerably lucky nowadays if one steer clear of Sir James Wilde, and if one's children do not bear a very striking resemblance to one's neighbour."