MR. PRESCOTT spread himself out before the fireplace, standing with his legs apart, and his coat tails extended. There was, of course, no fire in the month of June, but an Englishman spreading himself out upon his own hearthrug, like a cock on his appropriate elevation, is more an Englishman than at any other moment. The Squire looked benevolently, yet severely upon the curate, who sat before him, twisting his soft hat in his hands. This was the only sign of embarrassment Mr. Asquith showed, but it was very discernible. He sat with his face turned towards his judge, without any shrinking or quailing, a little pale, very self-possessed and quiet. It was a very serious moment, and that the curate well knew.

“My niece!” Mr. Prescott said, and his countenance cleared a little, for he had thought at first that it must be one of the princesses of his house that this man was wooing. “Mary! why, Mary is not old enough for this sort of thing. How old is she? Why, she is only a child!”

“You have got used to considering her a child, Mr. Prescott; but I believe she is one-and-twenty, if you will inquire.”

Mr. Prescott made a calculation within himself, and after a moment said, “So she is: I believe she is in her two-and-twentieth year. Who would have thought it! You must know,” he added, “Mr. Asquith—though I don’t know what your ideas may be on that subject—that though Mary is my niece, she has no money, not a penny. My sister was sadly imprudent in her marriage. Her orphan child, of course, had a home with me, but there is nothing in the way of fortune, not a sou.”

“So I understood,” said the curate, “otherwise I should never have ventured to approach her, being myself so poor a man.”

“Ah!” said the Squire, looking at him doubtfully; then he added with cheerfulness, “You are still on the first step, Mr. Asquith, there is no telling how far you may go.”

“I am not the stuff of which bishops are made,” said the curate, with a short laugh.

“Well, there is no telling,” said the other; and then he entered upon business. “You will understand,” he said, “that I must make certain inquiries before going any farther. In the matter of family now. We are not rich people, but in that respect we Prescotts have certain pretensions——”

“In that respect it is very easy to answer you, Mr. Prescott. So far as old family goes, mine is old enough. We have been in Cumberland in direct descent, father and son, settled in the same place, for three hundred years. But——” Mr. Prescott had been nodding his head in approval, saying to himself that he knew Asquith was a good name in the North. He looked up, but only with the faintest shadow on his face, at the curate’s “but.”

“But,” repeated Mr. Asquith firmly, “though we are an old-established race, we are not what you would call gentry, Mr. Prescott. My father is of the old class of statesmen in Cumberland——”

“What is that?” asked the Squire hastily.

“It is, I suppose, what you call yeomen in the South.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Prescott. He recovered from this shock, however, in shorter time than might have been expected; for a substantial yeoman is a very respectable personage, and there are often nice little hoards of money behind them; and then it was only Mary, after all.

“I don’t pretend to say that I should not have been better pleased had you sprung from a family of gentry, Mr. Asquith; but after all, to have a family of any kind is something in these days. And you, of course, have had the education of a gentleman.” The curate winced a little at this, not liking the idea that he had not always been a gentleman, even though he had the moment before disowned any such pretensions. But he did not betray his impatience, and Mr. Prescott continued, “The most important point is: you propose to marry my niece: what have you to support her? I have told you she has nothing of her own. Are you in circumstances to keep her in the position to which she has been accustomed? Your private means——”

“Mr. Prescott,” said the curate crushing his hat in his tremulous hands, “that is exactly the question—that is the painful part—I have nothing. I have no private means; I have no expectations to speak of. My father, when he dies, will leave me perhaps some trifle—a few hundred pounds; but the fact is, I have nothing—nothing but my income from my curacy.” He had not strength enough to meet the Squire’s astonished gaze. His head drooped forward a little. “I am aware that you must think me presumptuous to the last degree, even careless of her comfort—for I have nothing but my poverty to offer—nothing——” for once in his life Mr. Asquith’s courage fairly failed him, and he would have liked to run away, and be heard of in Horton no more. Oh, happy Mary, before whom no such ordeal lay!

“This is a very strange statement, Mr. Asquith,” the Squire said.

The curate assented with a movement of his head; he could not say any more.

“It is a very strange statement,” Mr. Prescott repeated. “You don’t expect, I hope, that I—with the many calls upon me——”

Mr. Asquith half got up from his chair; he raised his hand, half deprecating, half indignant.

“I have a great many claims upon me,” said the Squire reassured; “the estate does not bring in half it once did. You know as well as I do how landed property has deteriorated; and my second son is in the army, and has a great many expenses, and my girls to be provided for—I cannot be responsible for anything so far as Mary is concerned. I have given her her education and all that, but as for any allowance——”

“If she had anything of the sort, do you think I could ever have spoken?” the curate said.

Mr. Prescott was reassured: there was obvious sincerity in this disclaimer. He stood for a moment silent with a perturbed countenance, and then he said suddenly, “That’s all very well, Mr. Asquith, but you’re not like a silly girl who knows nothing—you’ve some acquaintance with the world. It is quite right of you to express such sentiments. But if you marry her, how are you to keep her? that is the question for me.”

“Sir,” said the curate, “you have a right to say anything—everything on that subject. It is the question, I know all the gravity of it. It is what I cannot answer even to myself.”

“If you would not have spoken in the other case, supposing she had something of her own—how was it that you spoke now?” said the Squire, pushing his advantage; “a man ought to be able to deny himself in such circumstances. Men of your cloth permit themselves freedoms which other poor men don’t. A parson marries and has a large family, and everybody is sorry for him, whereas, if it was a poor soldier who did it, or a clerk in a public office, or——”

The curate did not speak, it was all perfectly true. He had said the same himself a hundred times. He had said, even to the unfortunate culprit himself, that a clergyman, because he was a clergyman, had no right. And now it was brought home to himself, and he had not a word to say.

“What does my brother Hugh give you?” said the inexorable Squire. “A hundred a year? I suppose it is as much as he can afford. And how are you to live with a wife on a hundred a year? How do you live on it without a wife? Percy, besides his pay, costs me—but that is nothing to the purpose. I ask you, can you live on it yourself, Asquith, without any supplement, without anything from home?”

The curate smiled somewhat grimly. Anything from home! He had been obliged to pay back to his poor father various sums expended on his education, which was a very different thing from receiving help from home. He said, “I have been able to manage—without any assistance,” in a subdued tone. It was not pleasant to be thus cross-examined, but the Squire had a right to ask all manner of questions. He had put himself in Mr. Prescott’s power.

“Supposing you have—I think it’s very much to your credit. And there’s the lodgings, of course, that’s always something. But supposing you have—how are you to keep a wife? And have you thought of the consequences, sir?” said the Squire severely. “If it was only a wife even; but you know what always follows—half-a-dozen children before you know where you are. How are you to educate them, sir? How are you to feed them? How are you to set them out in the world? And yet you come and ask me, a man that has seen such things happen a hundred times, to give you my niece.”

Mr. Asquith blushed like a girl at this suggestion. Mary herself was scarcely more modest, more delicate in all such embarrassing questions. And though he was not a humorous man by nature, a gleam of the ludicrous made its way into the question through the fierce countenance of the Squire. “These consequences,” he said, “cannot come all at once. They will take a few years at least: and I don’t calculate on staying always at Horton. In a town, in a large parish, curates have better pay.”

“And are worked off their feet, they and all their belongings, their wives made drudges of, regular parish women, Bible women, or whatever you call them. I know what goes on in large parishes, in great towns. And the children grow up on the streets. No, the country’s bad enough, but at least they can get fresh air and milk in the country, and people may be kind to them: and there’s always a schoolmaster or someone to give them a little education.”

“Mr. Prescott,” said the curate mildly, “the children you are so kindly anxious about are not born yet, and perhaps never will be. Don’t let us go any farther than is necessary. The question in the meantime concerns only Mary and myself.”

“And how long will that be the case?” cried the Squire. But presently he calmed down. “You might get food perhaps,” he said. “I say perhaps—I don’t see how you are to do it—but allow that you could get food out of it, and a cottage to live in—where are your clothes to come from? Where are your shoes to come from? Mary is a lady; she has been brought up to have servants to wait upon her. Is my niece to be your housemaid, Mr. Asquith? your cook, and your washerwoman, and everything? You should marry somebody that is used to that sort of thing. Somebody who has the strength for it. Somebody in your own class of life!”

The curate rose up with a flush of anger on his face. He could keep his temper, but yet it stung him, all the more that it was just enough, and he had already said all this to himself. He said, “I fear it will do no good to talk of it longer, Mr. Prescott—you drive me to despair. And I don’t deny that it is all true, everything you say. But I shall not always be curate at Horton. I shall not always continue a curate even, I hope. Sometimes, even without much influence, if a man does his work well, promotion comes.”

“Very seldom,” said the Squire.

“Still it comes sometimes: and if ever man had an inducement to work—will you think it over and try to look upon it more favourably? I know what a sacrifice it must be for her. Still, she has a right to choose too.”

“To choose—at her age—knowing nothing of the world! Whatever you felt, sir, you should have kept it to yourself—you should not have spoken. How is a girl to know?”

“I thought so too,” said the poor curate, humbly. “But a man has not always command of himself.”

“A man ought always to have command of himself when another person’s comfort is concerned, especially a clergyman, who makes more profession of virtue than other men,” said the Squire, following him to the door, and sending that last volley after him. Mr. Asquith went away from the Hall a miserable man. He had not the heart to ask for Mary, to tell her how he had failed. As he hurried away, however, down the avenue, his heart, which had sunk altogether, began to rise a little in indignation. Why a clergyman more than other men? That a clergyman should be shut out from that side of life altogether was comprehensible. He might take vows as in the Church of Rome, there was reason in that. When men were so poor as he was, instead of tantalising them with the idea of freedom, and exposing them to all its risks, it might be better if they were under the protection of vows and forbidden to marry. But as that was not so, and the English ideal was quite different, why should it be worse in a clergyman than in other men? A clergyman could not struggle and push for promotion. He could not compete and shoulder his way through the crowd. Must he give up also all that made existence sweet? And then the further question arose, would it have been better for Mary had he held his tongue and gone away and never told her he loved her? Had he perhaps closed that chapter to her too? Perhaps she might have forgotten him, and learned to love a richer man. But then perhaps she might not. Naturally a man feels that a woman who has learned to love him will not easily change, or transfer her affections to another. Would it not have been a wrong to Mary had he kept silence, had he never told her? It is better even to love and lose, the poet says, than never to love at all. It is better to have the triumph and delight of knowing that you are loved, even if that love never comes to any earthly close. Why should Mary have lost that because they were both poor? Nobody could take away from them that moment of blessedness, that sense of sweetest union, even if they might never marry at all—never—

But here a pang which was very acute and poignant like a sword went through the curate’s heart. Never marry at all! Lose her, leave her, be parted from her, after what they had said to each other! Oh, what deep shadows come along with the brightest sunshine of life! What was the good of living at all, of having known each other, of having recognized the loveliness and sweetness of existence, if this was what had to be?