Janetta was hardly surprised when, two days later, she was asked to give a private audience to Mr. Cuthbert Brand. She had not yet told Nora of the course that she had pursued, for she was indeed rather unnecessarily ashamed of it. "It was just like a worldly mamma asking a young man his intentions about her daughter," she said to herself, with a whimsical smile. "Probably nothing will come of it but a cessation of these silly little attentions to Nora." But she felt a little shy and constrained when she entered the drawing-room, and, while shaking hands with her cousin, she did not lift her eyes to his face.

When she had taken a seat, however, and managed to steal a glance at him, she was half-provoked, half-reassured. Cuthbert's mobile face was full of a merry, twinkling humor, and expressed no penitence at all. She was so much astonished that she forgot her shyness, and looked at him inquiringly without opening her lips.

Cuthbert laughed—an irrepressible little laugh, as if he could not help it. "Look here, Cousin Janetta," he said, "I'm awfully sorry, but I really can't help it. The idea of you as a duenna and of Wyvis as a heavy father has been tickling me ever since yesterday, and I shall have to have it out sooner or later. I assure you it's only a nervous affection. If I didn't laugh, I might cry or faint, and that would be worse, you know."

"I don't quite see the joke," said Janetta, gravely.

"The joke," said Cuthbert, "lies in the contrast between yourself and the role you have taken upon you."

"It is a role that I am obliged to take upon me," interposed Janetta; "because my sisters have no father, and a mother whose health makes it impossible for her to guard them as she would like to do."

"Now you're going to be severe," said Cuthbert; "and indeed I am guiltless of anything but a little harmless fooling. I can but tender my humblest apologies, and assure you that I have resigned my post in Mrs. Smith's educational establishment, and that I will keep my flowers in future to myself, unless I may send them with your consent and that of my authoritative elder brother."

Janetta was not mollified. "It is easy for you to talk of it so lightly," she said, "but you forget that you might have involved both my sisters in serious trouble."

"Don't you think I should have been able to get them out again?" said Cuthbert, with all the lightness to which she objected. "Don't you think that I could have pacified the schoolmistress? There is one thing that I must explain. My fancy for teaching was a fad, undertaken for its own sake, which led me accidentally at first to Mrs. Smith's school. I did not know that your sisters were there until I had made my preliminary arrangements."

Janetta flushed deeply, and did not reply. Nora's imagination had been more active than she expected. Cuthbert, who was watching her, saw the flush and the look of surprise, and easily guessed what had passed between the sisters.

"Did you ever read Sheridan's 'Rivals?'" he asked, quietly. "Don't you remember the romantic heroine who insisted on her romance? She would hardly consent to marry a man unless he had a history, and would help her to make one for herself?"

"I don't think that Nora is at all like Lydia Languish."

"Possibly not, in essentials. But she loves romance and mystery and excitement, as Lydia Languish did. It is a very harmless romance that consists in sending a few cut flowers by Parcel Post, Cousin Janetta."

"I know—it sounds very little," Janetta said, "but it may do harm for all that."

"Has it done harm to your sister, then?" Cuthbert inquired, with apparent-innocence, but with the slight twinkle of his eye, which told of inward mirth. Janetta was again growing indignant, and was about to answer rather sharply, when he once more changed his tone. "There," he said, "I have teased you quite enough, haven't I? I have been presuming on our relationship to be as provoking as I could, because—honestly—I thought that you might have trusted me a little more. Now, shall I be serious?"

"If you can," said Janetta.

"That's awfully severe. By nature, I must tell you, I am the most serious, not to say melancholy, person in creation. But on a fine day my spirits run away with me. Now, Janetta—I may call you Janetta, may not I?—I am going to be serious, deadly serious, as serious as if it were a wet day in town. And the communication that I wish to make to you as the head of the family, which you seem to be, is that I am head over ears in love with your sister Nora, and that I beg for the honor of her hand."

"You are joking," said his hearer, reproachfully.

"Never was joking further from my thoughts. Getting married is an exceedingly solemn business, I believe. I want to marry Nora and take her to Paris."

"Oh, this is ridiculous: you can't mean it," said Janetta.

"Why ridiculous? Did I not tell you that I admired Miss Lydia Languish? Her desire for a romance was quite praiseworthy: it is what every woman cherishes in her heart of hearts: only Nora, being more naive and frank and child-like than most women, let me see the desire more clearly than women mostly do. That's why I love her. She is natural and lovable and lovely. Don't tell me that I can't win her heart. I know I may have touched her fancy, but that is not enough. Let me have the chance, and I think that I can go deeper still."

"You said that you would be serious, but you don't know how serious this is to me," said Janetta, the tears rising to her eyes. "My father told me to take care of her: she is very young—and not very wise; and how am I to know whether you mean what you say?"

"I do mean it, indeed!" said Cuthbert, in a much graver tone. "I have got into the habit of talking as if I felt very little—a ridiculous habit, I acknowledge—but, in this matter, I mean it from the bottom of my heart."

"I suppose, then," said Janetta, tremulously, "that you must speak to mamma—and to Nora. I am not at all the head of the house, although you are pleased—in fun—to call me so. I am only Nora's half-sister, fond of her and anxious about her, and ready to do all that I can do for her good."

Cuthbert looked at her intently. Her face was pale, and the black dress that she wore was not altogether becoming to her dark eyes and complexion, but there was something pathetic to him in the weight of care which seemed to sit upon those young brows and bear down the slender shoulders of the girl. The new sensation thus given caused him to say, with sudden earnestness—

"Will you forgive me for having spoken and acted so thoughtlessly? I never meant to cause you so much anxiety. You see, I am not very well acquainted with English ways, and I may have made more mistakes than I knew. When Nora is my wife you shall not have to fear for her happiness."

"You speak very confidently of making her your wife," said Janetta, forgiving him in her heart, nevertheless. "But you have no house—no profession, have you?"

"No income, you mean?" said Cuthbert, with his merry smile. "Oh, yes, I have a profession. It does not pay me quite so well as it might do, but I think I shall do better by-and-bye. Then I have a couple of hundreds a year of my own. Is it too much of a pittance to begin upon?"

"Nora is quite too young to begin upon anything. If only you would leave her alone for a year or two!—till she is a little more staid and sensible!"

"But that's too late, don't you see? That's where my apologies have to come in. I have disturbed the peace already, haven't I?"

"Mr. Brand," said Janetta, gravely, in spite of an exclamation of protest from her cousin, "I don't think that we are going quite deeply enough into the matter. There are one or two things that I must say: there is no one else to say them. Nora is young and foolish, but she is affectionate and sensitive, and if she once cares for you, you may make the happiness or the misery of her life. Our dear father told me to take care of her. And I am not sure that he would have sanctioned her engagement to you."

"I'd better send Wyvis to talk to you," said Cuthbert, starting up and nearly upsetting a chair in his eagerness. "I knew he could manage and—and explain things better than I could. He's well up in the family affairs. Will you see him now?"

"Now?"

"He's outside waiting. He wouldn't come in. I'll go and send him to you. No, don't object: there are ever so many things that you two elders had better talk over together. I must say," said Cuthbert, beginning to laugh again in his light-hearted way, "that, when I think of Wyvis as a family man, bent on seeing his younger brother se ranger, and you as Nora's stern guardian, I am seized with an access of uncontrollable mirth."

He caught up his hat and left the room so quickly that Janetta, taken by surprise, could not stop him. She tried to follow, but she was too late: he had rushed off, leaving the hall-door open, and a draught of cold air was ascending the stairs and causing her stepmother peevishly to remark that Janetta's visitors were really intolerable. "Who was it, this time?" she asked of her second daughter Georgie, who was standing at the window—the mother and her girls being assembled in Mrs. Colwyn's bedroom, her favorite resort on cold afternoons.

Georgie gave a little giggle—her manners were not perfect, in spite of a term at Mrs. Smith's superior seminary for young ladies—and answered, under her breath—

"It was Mr. Cuthbert Brand."

Nora's book fell from her knee. When she picked it up her cheeks were crimson and her eyes were flashing fire.

"Don't be absurd, Georgie. It was not."

"Indeed it was, Nora. I suppose he came to see Janetta, and Janetta has sent him away. Oh, how he's running, although he is a little lame! He has caught some one—his brother, I believe it is; and now the brother's walking back with him."

"I shall go down," said Mrs. Colwyn, with dignity. "It is not at all proper for a young person like Janetta to receive gentlemen alone. I shall go and sit in the drawing-room myself."

"Then Janetta will take her visitors into the dining-room," said Nora, abruptly. "She has only business with these people, mamma: they don't come to visit us because they like us—it is only when they want us to do something for them; so I would not put myself out for them if I were you. And as for Janetta's being young, she is the oldest person amongst us." And then Nora turned to her book, which she held upside down without being at all aware of it.

"I do not know what you mean, Nora," was Mrs. Colwyn's fretful response; "and if the other brother is coming here, I shall certainly not disturb myself, for I believe him to be a wild, dissipated, immoral, young man."

"Just the sort of man for Janet to receive alone," murmured Georgie, maliciously. Georgie was the member of the family who "had a tongue."

Meanwhile Wyvis had come into the house, though without Cuthbert, who had thought it better to disappear into the gathering darkness; and Janetta received him in the hall.

He laughed a little as he took her hand. "Cuthbert is a little impatient, is he not? Well, he has persuaded me into talking this matter over with you. I'm to come in here, am I?" as Janetta silently opened the sitting-room door for him. "This looks pleasant," he added after a moment's pause.

In the gathering evening gloom the shabbiness of the furniture could not be seen, and the fire-light danced playfully over the worn, comfortable-looking chairs drawn up to the hearth, on the holly and mistletoe which decorated the walls, and the great cluster of geranium and Christmas roses which the Adairs had sent to Janetta the day before. Everything looked homelike and comfortable, and perhaps it was no wonder that Wyvis—accustomed to the gloom of his own home, or the garish splendor of a Paris hotel—felt that he was entering a new sphere, or undergoing some new experience.

"Don't light the lamp," he said, in his imperious way: "let us talk in this half-light, if you don't mind? it's pleasanter."

"And easier," said Janetta, softly.

"Easier? Does it need an effort?"

"I am afraid I have something unpleasant to say."

"So have I. We are quits, then. You can begin."

"Your brother has been asking if he maybe engaged to Nora——"

"If he may marry her out of hand, you mean. That's what he wants to do."

"We know very little of him," said Janetta, rather unsteadily, "or of you. Things have been said against you in Beaminster—you have yourself told me things that I did not like—indeed, my father almost warned me against you——"

A murmur from Wyvis Brand sounded uncommonly like "the devil he did!"—but Janetta did not stop to listen.

"I never heard anything but vague generalities against him, but then I never heard anything particularly good. I don't like the way in which he has pursued his acquaintance with Nora. I have no authority with her—not much influence with her mother—and, therefore, I throw myself on you for help," said Janetta, her musical voice taking a pathetically earnest cadence; "and I ask you to beg your brother to wait—to let Nora grow older and know her own mind a little better—to give us the chance of knowing him before he asks to take her away."

"You have not said either of the things that I was expecting to hear," said Wyvis.

"What were those?"

"How much money he had a year!"

"Oh, he told me about that."

"Or—an allusion to his forbears: his father's character and his mother's relations—the two bugbears of Beaminster."

"I think nothing of those, if Cuthbert himself is good."

"Well, he is good. He is as different from me as light is from darkness. He is a little thoughtless and unpractical sometimes, but he is sweet-tempered, honest, true, clean-living, and God-fearing. Will that suit you?"

"If he is all that——"

"He is that and more. We are not effusive, Cuthbert and I, but I think him one of the best fellows in the world. She'll be lucky who gets him, in my opinion."

"All the more reason, then, why I must say a still more unpleasant thing than ever," she replied. "Nora is in great trouble, because she has been told what I have known for some time. Her mother does not always control herself; you know what I mean? She must not marry without telling this—we cannot deceive the man who is to be her husband—he must know the possible disgrace."

"If every woman were as straightforward and honorable as you, Janetta, there would be fewer miserable marriages," said Wyvis, slowly. "You are, no doubt, right to speak; but, on the other hand, our family record is much worse than yours. If one of you can condescend to take one of us, I think we shall have the advantage."

Janetta drew a long breath.

"Then, will you help me in what I ask?"

"Yes, I will. I'll speak to Cuthbert and point out how reasonable you are. Then—you'll let him cultivate your sister's acquaintance, I suppose? In spite of your disclaimers, I believe you are supreme in the house. I wish there were more like you to be supreme, Janetta. I wish—to God I wish—that I had met you—a woman like you—eight years ago."

And before she could realize the meaning of what he had said to her, the man was gone.