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it! I believe her to be as selfish as her brother was, and if it were not for the expense, and our own girls to bring out—for even if anything should come of that attachment between Clara and Conway, which I don’t at all reckon on, I am determined that all five must and shall be presented at Court!— well, as I say, if it were not for that I should be strongly tempted to take her to London myself, and I shouldn’t wonder at it if she made a very respectable marriage, even though she isn’t in the first blush of youth! Only, you may depend upon it she would refuse to leave Aubrey,” she added in a despondent tone. “And soon it will be too late, if only she knew it!”
    Venetia did know it, but since she could see no remedy while Conway remained obstinately abroad she continued to make the best of things. Lady Denny would have been astonished had she been allowed to know with what misgiving Venetia regarded the future. For any female in her position it was bleak indeed, and seemed to offer her no choice between marriage with Edward Yardley or the life of an ageing, and probably unwanted, spinster in her brother’s household. Mistress of an easy competence, it was convention and not dependence that would force her to remain at Undershaw. Single ladies did not live alone. Sisters, past the marriageable age, might do it; years and years ago the Lady Eleanor Butler and her dear friend, Miss Sarah Ponsonby, had done it, but in the teeth of parental opposition. They had fled to a cottage somewhere in Wales, renouncing the world just as if they had been nuns; and since they were still living there and had never, so far as anyone knew, stirred from their retreat, it was to be inferred that they were content. But Venetia was no eccentric, and even had she possessed a bosom friend she would not for an instant have entertained the thought of setting up house with her: marriage to Edward would be preferable to such a manage. And without indulging her fancy with girlish dreams of a noble and handsome suitor Venetia felt that marriage with another than Edward would be the most agreeable solution to her difficulties.
    She had never been in love; and at five-and-twenty her expectations were not high. Her only acquaintance with romance lay between the covers of the books she had read; and if she had once awaited with confidence the arrival on her scene of a Sir Charles Grandison it had not been long before commonsense banished such optimism. In the days when she had now and then attended the Assemblies in York she had attracted a great deal of admiration, and more than one promising young gentleman, first struck by her beauty and then captivated by her frank manners and the charm of her smiling eyes, would have been very happy to have followed up a mere ballroom acquaintanceship. Unfortunately there was no possibility of following it up in the accepted mode, and although several susceptible gentlemen inveighed bitterly against the barbarity of a parent who would permit no visitor to enter his house none of them was so deeply heart-smitten after standing up with the lovely Miss Lanyon for one country-dance as to cast aside every canon of propriety (as well as to the horrid dread of making a great cake of himself) and ride out of York to Undershaw, either to hang about the gates of the Manor in the hope of achieving a clandestine meeting with Venetia, or to force his way into the house.
    Only Edward Yardley, Sir Francis’s godson, had been accorded tacit permission to cross his threshold. He was not made welcome, Sir Francis rarely emerging from his book-room during his visits, but since he was permitted to walk, talk, and ride with Venetia it was generally believed that an offer from him for her hand would be accepted by her morose parent.
    No one could have described him as an impatient lover. Venetia was the magnet which drew him to Undershaw, but it was four years before he declared himself, and she could almost have believed then