“But, my dear uncle, my cousins are equally well born, and equally well educated; I do not see why there should be any difference between them.”
“Yes, my dear, there is a very great difference,” Captain Bradshaw said positively. “Frank was brought up with the idea that he should never have to work for his living. Therefore he has no notion whatever of business, is romantic in his ideas, would not do a mean thing to save his life, and refused, even at the risk of losing my favour, to do as I wanted him—in fact, is a gentleman. Fred has been brought up in a different school. He was educated at some private school or other; his father is, I have always heard—for I never saw the man, and never want to—is a sharp man of business, and married my silly sister for her money, and Fred has had it instilled into him that money-making is the great end of life. He is a good-tempered, off-hand young fellow, and this has not done him so much harm as it would do most lads. He has been to college, certainly, but that has not done him as much good as it should have done. He has turned out a man of the world, and as such, though I like him very well, I could never love him as I do Frank. You see the difference of their marriages. Frank marries a little Irish girl without a halfpenny. She, I have no doubt, to use his own expression, a most loveable little woman; and he is as proud of his marriage as if he had made the best match conceivable. Fred, on the other hand, without a tithe of Frank's natural advantages, marries a girl with a fortune, and without a father to look after her. I shall be interested, Alice, in watching the different way in which the young couples will go on.”
“I know which will be the happiest, uncle.”
“You think you know, Alice, because you have not got rid of your romance yet. From what I know of my two nephews, I should say they would both make very good husbands in a different sort of way.”
Alice dissented very strongly from her uncle, but as she could not have said so without adducing reasons which would have shaken what belief her uncle had in Fred Bingham, which she was determined not to do, she was silent.
CARRY was in unusually low spirits. She had that morning received a letter from Fred Bingham, written from the country. In it he told her that he feared he should be detained three weeks, but that he would make arrangements for the marriage to take place immediately he returned; but that it must be done quietly before a registrar. Carry quite believed that it would be as he said, still she was sick and low at the thought that another month of this wearying deception and secrecy must take place. After the shop was closed for the night, she took a piece of work as usual, but finding that it was in vain to endeavour to keep her attention fixed, and that now and then a tear would fall upon it, she put her work down and took up the “Times,” not for the sake of reading it, but to screen her face from her father.