"What business is it of Maurice's?" he said to himself. "Does he
think every one that looks at his scarecrow of a daughter--" But there he
had need to acknowledge to himself his injustice to Miss Frarnie, a modest
maiden who had more cause to complain of him than he of her, since he had
done his best to please her, and her only fault lay in being pleased so
easily. She was pleased with him: he understood that now, though his
endeavors to enlist her had been for a very different manifestation of
interest. Perhaps it flattered him a little: he paused long enough to
consider what sort of a lot it would be if he really had been plighted to
Frarnie instead of Louie. Love and all that nonsense, he had heard say,
changed presently into a quiet sort of contentment; and if that were so,
it would be all the same at the end of a few years which one he took. He
felt that Frarnie was not very sympathetic, that her large white face
seldom sparkled with much intelligence, that she would make but a dull
companion; but, for all that, she would be, he knew, an excellent
housewife: she would bring a house with her too; and when a man is
married, and has half a dozen children tumbling round him, there is
entertainment enough for him, and it is another bond between him and the
wife he did not love too well at first; and if she were his, his would be
the Sabrina also, and when the Sabrina's days were over perhaps a great
East Indiaman, and with that the respect and deference of all his
townsmen: court would be paid to him, his words would be words of weight,
he would have a voice in the selection of town-officers, he would roll up
money in the bank, and some day he should be master of the great Maurice
mansion and the gardens and grapehouses.
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