'
Through it all the father never suspected the real state of his
son's mind. He was too simple to think it possible that the
purpose which Silverbridge had declared to him as they walked
together from the Beargarden had already been thrown to the winds.
He did not like to ask why the thing was not settled. Young men,
he thought, were sometimes shy, and young ladies not always ready
to give immediate encouragement. But when he saw them together he
concluded that matters were going in the right direction. It was,
however, an opinion which he had all to himself.
During the next three or four days which followed the scene in the
billiard-room Isabel kept herself out of her lover's way. She had
explained to him that which she wished him to do, and she left him
to do it. Day by day she watched the circumstances of the life
around her, and knew that it had not been done. She was sure that
it could not have been done while the Duke was explaining to her
the beauty of quints, and expiating on the horrors of twelve
pennies, and twelve inches, and twelve ounces,--variegated in some
matters by sixteen and fourteen! He could not know that she was
ambitious of becoming his daughter-in-law, while he was opening
out to her the mysteries of the House of Lords, and explaining how
it came to pass that while he was a member of one House of
Parliament, his son should be sitting as a member of another;--how
it was that a nobleman could be a commoner, and how a peer of one
part of the Empire could sit as the representative of a borough in
another part.
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