Herbert's face grew bright with hope as he listened. "And do you think he'll answer at once?" he asked.
"Yes, papa is always very prompt and decided; never keeps one long in suspense."
Mr. Carrington met our heroine at the dinner-table with such a bright, glad smile, and treated her in so kind and fatherly a manner that she felt sure he knew all, and was much pleased with the prospect before them. But she was afraid Harry did not like it--did not want her for a sister. He was usually very gay and talkative, full of fun and frolic. He had been so during their ride, but now his manner seemed strangely altered; he was moody and taciturn, almost cross.
Keen are the pangs Of hapless love and passion unapproved.
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?"
"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.