CHAPTER VII.
MISS PRETTYMAN'S PRIVATE ROOM.
[Illustration] Major Grantly, when threatened by his father with pecuniary punishment, should he demean himself by such a marriage as that he had proposed to himself, had declared that he would offer his hand to Miss Crawley on the next morning.

This, however, he had not done.
He had not done it, partly because he did not quite believe his father's threat, and partly because he felt that that threat was almost justified,--for the present moment,--by the circumstances in which Grace Crawley's father had placed himself.

Henry Grantly acknowledged, as he drove himself home on the morning after his dinner at the rectory, that in this matter of his marriage he did owe much to his family.

Should he marry at all, he owed it to them to marry a lady.

And Grace Crawley,--so he told himself,--was a lady.
And he owed it to them to bring among them as his wife a woman who should not disgrace him or them by her education, manners, or even by her personal appearance.