her own money, and not that we should all profit by her making this grand marriage.'
'I should quite feel with you.'
'Marian, we have never talked that over; but I know you cannot bear the Faulkners.'
'What is the use of asking me, Lionel?'
'O, I know you can't, as well as if you had said so; and I want to know how you could let Caroline go and do such a thing?'
'I? How could I help it?' said Marian smiling, at the boy's assuming that she had power of which she was far from being conscious. 'Besides, I thought you liked Mr. Faulkner; you, all of you, did nothing but praise him at Christmas.'
'I did at first, not at last,' said Lionel. 'Besides, liking a man to go out shooting with is not the same as liking him to marry one's sister.'
'By no means!' cried Marian, emphatically. 'But what made you think ill of him?'
'Things I heard him say to Elliot when we were out together.'
'Did Gerald hear them?' asked Marian, very anxiously, as she remembered what a hero Mr. Faulkner was in her brother's estimation.
'No, I don't think he did. He certainly was not there the worst time of all,--the time that gave a meaning to all the rest. Don't you remember that day when Mr. Faulkner drove Elliot and me in his dog-cart to look at that horse at Salisbury? I am sure I never praised him after that day. He said what Elliot never would have said himself--never.'
'How?' Marian could not help asking, though she doubted the next moment whether it was wise to have done so.
'Things about--about religion--the Bible,' said Lionel, looking down and mumbling, as if it was with difficulty that he squeezed out the answer. 'Now, you know, I have heard,' he added, speaking more freely, 'I have heard people make fun with a text or a name out of the Bible many a time; and though that is very bad of them, I think they don't mean much harm by it. Indeed, I have now and then done it myself, and should oftener, if I had not known how you hated it.'
'It is a very wrong thing,' but I see what you mean,--that some people do it from want of thought.'
'Yes, just so; but that is a very different thing from almost quizzing the whole Bible,--at least talking as if it was an absurd thing to accept the whole of it, I do declare, Marian, he was worse when he began to praise it than he was before; for he talked of the Old Testament as if it was just like the Greek mythology, and then he compared it to Homer, and ?schylus, and the Koran. To be sure he did say it was better poetry and morality; but the idea of comparing it! I don't mean comparing as if it must be better, but as if it stood on the same ground.'
'And did Elliot listen to all this?' said Marian, thinking the poison must have been in rather too intellectual a form for Elliot.
'He listened,' said Lionel. 'I don't think he would ever set up to say such things for himself; but I believe he rather liked hearing them said. I am quite sure this Faulkner will make him worse than he is already, for all this talk is a hundred times worse than going on in Elliot's way.'
'To be sure it is--a thousand times!'
'But what I want to know is this, Marian? has Caroline got any notion of what sort of a man she has got? Because if she does it with her eyes open, it can't be helped; but if not, I think she ought to be warned; for I don't suppose the man is fool enough to talk in this way to her. Indeed, I think I heard him say that believing is all very well for women.'
'Why don't you tell her, then?'
