MABEL'S PROGRESS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "AUNT MARGARET'S TROUBLE."
BOOK III.
CHAPTER XI. CLEMENT HAS NOT TIME TO
ANSWER MR. JONES.

CLEMENT CHARLEWOOD, as Miss O'Brien had
shrewdly suspected, had not been detained by
any business so urgent as to have compelled
his presence at Hammerham, had he willed that
it should be otherwise. He had, indeed, said a
few words to his father respecting the blue
square letter received that afternoon, and had
told him that he (Clement) did not intend to
join the pic-nic party, but would go down to
the office and answer Jones—the sender of
the blue letter aforesaid—about that matter of
the new Corn Exchange at Eastfield. "I'm
not at all sure that it will be worth our while,
to send in a tender for the contract, sir," he
had said, with his mind apparently full of the
subject of Mr. Jones's communication. But
then Clement Charlewood had walked to the
office, and had sat down at his desk with the
blue envelope before him, and leaning his head
on his hands, had silently endured an hour's
acute anguish.

Since the day on which he had last parted
from Mabel Earnshaw at Eastfield, she had
seldom been absent from his thoughts. He
had told himself before that final interview that
if she should still persist in her intention of
going on the stage, he would resolutely pluck
from his heart all hope and intention of winning
her for his wife. That should be the decisive
trial, and if she should prove deaf alike to the
pleadings of love and the warnings of friendship,
it would become him to set himself
resolutely to stifle his unrequited attachment.
But that had been, as I have said, before his
parting interview at Eastfield, and whilst the
unacknowledged hope was yet glowing at the
bottom of his heart, that Mabel would yield to
his disinterested love. That the hope had been
frustrated, the reader knows; and yet Clement
Charlewood had by no means kept his resolution
of giving up all thought of winning Mabel for
his wife. He knew that the step she had taken
had put a still greater barrier between them
than that which previously existed, and which
was already sufficiently formidable in the eyes
of his family; Mabel's lack, namely, of wealth
or social rank superior to his own. These
obstacles, indeed, he did not much regard, for
his mind was quite clear as to this matter.
And he could boldly argue his cause with his
father, as long as the objections of the latter
only related to Mabel's poverty and social
obscurity. But as to this step which Mabel had
taken, in despite of all counsel and warning,
Clement felt that it would be more difficult for
him to plead with others in her defence, inasmuch
as his own judgment and his own often-
uttered opinion went against her. Nevertheless,
in some vague way, which he did not attempt
to define to himself, all obstacles were to be
surmounted, if only Mabel could be brought to
love him. She was at least fancy-free; and as
long as her heart continued disengaged, so
long he should cherish a hope of winning
her. In short, he loved deeply and hoped
persistently; but with the habitual shy reserve
of his character, he kept all this within his own
breast. His father was comfortably satisfied
that Clement had dismissed his love-fancy
completely from his mind; and none of the family—
save, perhaps, Penelope, who was occasionally
troubled by a lurking suspicion that all was not
quite well with her brother—imagined that the
thought of Mabel Earnshaw ever caused him one
second's uneasiness. The advent of Geraldine
O'Brien at Bramley Manor had, indeed, given
rise to quite other hopes and speculations.
Miss O'Brien's fortune, it is true, was small,
but she was well-born, well-bred, and well-connected,
and—crowning glory in the eyes of the
rich contractor—her grandfather had been an
Irish peer. Man cannot live by bread alone,
nor even by bread with an unlimited quantity
of butter on it. The most prosaic people have
some faculty or aspiration or ideal, which craves
to be fed in a quite different manner and on
far different food from any recognisable by the
five senses.

Mr. Charlewood was not highly imaginative,
but he had some imagination; and his imagination,
such as it was, declared that to be the
father-in-law of a lord's granddaughter must
needs be a most desirable position, and an
object of ambition for which it was quite worth
while to strive very earnestly.

He therefore observed with great satisfaction
that Miss O'Brien besides—the halo of
aristocracy, which made her admirable in his