He had not given his mind much to the matter, but he felt that a woman should be sought for,--sought for and extracted, cunningly, as it were, from some hiding-place, and not sent out into a market to be exposed as for sale.

In his own personal history there had been a misfortune,--a misfortune, the sense of which he could never, at any moment, have expressed to any ears, the memory of which had been always buried in his own bosom,--but a misfortune in that no such cunning extraction on his part had won for him the woman to whose hands had been confided the strings of his heart.

His wife had undergone that process of extraction before he had seen her, and his marriage with her had been a matter of sagacious bargaining.

He was now told that his daughter must be sent out among young men in order that she might become sufficiently fond of some special one to be regardless of Tregear.

There was a feeling that in doing so she must lose something of the freshness of the bloom of her innocence.