"If your mamma is afraid that Fred will make me an offer, tell her that

I would not marry him if he asked me. But he is not going to do so,

that I am aware. He certainly never has asked me."

"Mary, you are always so violent."

"And you are always so exasperating."

"I? What can you blame me for?"

"Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating. There is the

bell--I think we must go down."

"I did not mean to quarrel," said Rosamond, putting on her hat.

"Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarrelled. If one is not to get into

a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?"

"Am I to repeat what you have said?" "Just as you please. I never say

what I am afraid of having repeated. But let us go down."

Mr. Lydgate was rather late this morning, but the visitors stayed long

enough to see him; for Mr. Featherstone asked Rosamond to sing to him,

and she herself was so kind as to propose a second favorite song of

his--"Flow on, thou shining river"--after she had sung "Home, sweet

home" (which she detested). This hard-headed old Overreach approved of

the sentimental song, as the suitable garnish for girls, and also as

fundamentally fine, sentiment being the right thing for a song.

Mr. Featherstone was still applauding the last performance, and

assuring missy that her voice was as clear as a blackbird's, when Mr.

Lydgate's horse passed the window.

His dull expectation of the usual disagreeable routine with an aged

patient--who can hardly believe that medicine would not "set him up" if

the doctor were only clever enough--added to his general disbelief in

Middlemarch charms, made a doubly effective background to this vision

of Rosamond, whom old Featherstone made haste ostentatiously to

introduce as his niece, though he had never thought it worth while to

speak of Mary Garth in that light. Nothing escaped Lydgate in

Rosamond's graceful behavior: how delicately she waived the notice

which the old man's want of taste had thrust upon her by a quiet

gravity, not showing her dimples on the wrong occasion, but showing

them afterwards in speaking to Mary, to whom she addressed herself with

so much good-natured interest, that Lydgate, after quickly examining

Mary more fully than he had done before, saw an adorable kindness in

Rosamond's eyes. But Mary from some cause looked rather out of temper.

"Miss Rosy has been singing me a song--you've nothing to say against

that, eh, doctor?" said Mr. Featherstone. "I like it better than your

physic."

"That has made me forget how the time was going," said Rosamond, rising

to reach her hat, which she had laid aside before singing, so that her

flower-like head on its white stem was seen in perfection above-her

riding-habit. "Fred, we must really go."




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