He admitted that it was time he was thinking of getting married: not, of course, to Fanny, but to Mama. “Well, I know, Mama,” he said apologetically. “But the thing is I’ve got no fancy for one of these dashed suitable marriages, where you don’t really care a fig for the girl, or she for you. I don’t mean to offer marriage to any girl who don’t give me a leveller. So I daresay I shall remain a bachelor, for they don’t—any of ’em! And if one did,” he added thoughtfully, “it’s Lombard Street to a China orange you wouldn’t take to her!”

“Dearest boy, I should take to any girl whom you loved!” declared Mrs. Staple.

He grinned his appreciation of this mendacity, and gave her shoulders a hug, saying: “That was a whisker!”

She boxed his ears. “Odious boy! The fact of the matter is that it is a thousand pities we are not living in archaic times. What you would have liked, my son, is to have rescued some female from a dragon, or an ogre!”

“Famous good sport to have had a turn-up with a dragon,” he agreed. “As long as you didn’t find yourself with the girl left on your hands afterwards, which I’ve a strong notion those fellows did.”

“Such girls,” his mother reminded him, “were always very beautiful.”

“To be sure they were! Dead bores to, depend upon it! In fact, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the dragons were very glad to be rid of ’em,” said John.

Not very promising, this. But Fanny had discovered Elizabeth Kelfield, and Mrs. Staple had acknowledged, after careful and critical study of Miss Kelfield, that here was a lady who might well take John’s fancy. She was dark; she was decidedly handsome; her fortune was respectable; and although she was not quite twenty years of age she seemed older, the circumstance of her having taken from an invalid mother’s shoulders the burden of household cares having given her an assurance beyond her years. Mrs. Staple thought she had quality, and began to cultivate the ailing Mrs. Kelfield.