Chapter X

Keen are the pangs Of hapless love and passion unapproved. --SMOLLETT'S "REGICIDE"

Hardly anything could have been more distasteful to Horace Dinsmore than the state of affairs revealed to him by Herbert Carrington's note. He was greatly vexed, not at the lad's manner of preferring his request, but that it should have been made at all. He was not ready, yet to listen to such a proposal coming from any person, however eligible, much less from one so sadly afflicted as poor Herbert. He sought his wife's presence with the missive in his hand.

"What is the matter, my dear?" she asked; "I have seldom seen you so disturbed."

"The most absurd nonsense! the most ridiculously provoking affair! Herbert Carrington asking me to give him my daughter! I don't wonder at your astonished look, Rose; a couple of silly children. I should have given either of them credit for more sense."

"It has certainly taken me very much by surprise," said Rose, smiling. "I cannot realize that Elsie is grown up enough to be beginning with such things; yet you know she has passed her fifteenth birthday, and that half the girls about here become engaged before they are sixteen."

"But Elsie shall not. I'll have no nonsense of the kind for years to come. She shall not marry a day before she is twenty-one, I had nearly said twenty-five; and I don't think I'll allow it before then."

Rose laughed. "My dear, do you know what my age was when you married me?"

"Twenty-one, you told me."

"Don't you think my father ought then to have kept us waiting four years longer?"

"No," he answered, stooping to stroke her hair, and snatch a kiss from her rich red lips.

She looked up smilingly into his face. "Ah, consistency is a jewel! and pray how old were you when you married the first time? and what was then the age of Elsie's mother?"

"Your arguments are not unanswerable, Mrs. Dinsmore. Your father could spare you, having several other daughters; I have but one, and can't spare her. Elsie's mother was not older when I married her, it is true, than Elsie is now, but was much more mature, and had neither the happy home nor the doting father her daughter has. And as for myself, though much too young to marry, I was a year older than this Herbert Carrington; and I was in sound and vigorous health, while he, poor fellow, is sadly crippled, and likely always to be an invalid, and very unlikely to live to so much as see his majority. Do you think I ought for a moment to contemplate allowing Elsie to sacrifice herself to him?"

"It would seem a terrible sacrifice; and yet after all it will depend very much upon the state of her own feelings."

"If she were five or six years older, I should say yes to that; but girls of her age