CHAPTER IV.
SAFE AGAINST LOVE-MAKING.
A dear cousin, and safe against love-making! This was Clara's verdict respecting Will Belton, as she lay thinking of him in bed that night.
Why that warranty against love-making should be a virtue in her eyes I cannot, perhaps, explain.

But all young ladies are apt to talk to themselves in such phrases about gentlemen with whom they are thrown into chance intimacy;--as though love-making were in itself a thing injurious and antagonistic to happiness, instead of being, as it is, the very salt of life.

Safe against love-making! And yet Mrs.Askerton, her friend, had spoken of the probability of such love-making as being the great advantage of his coming.

And there could not be a second opinion as to the expediency of a match between her and her cousin in a worldly point of view.

Clara, moreover, had already perceived that he was a man fit to guide a wife, very good-humoured,--and good-tempered also, anxious to give pleasure to others, a man of energy and forethought, who would be sure to do well in the world and hold his head always high among his fellows;--as good a husband as a girl could have.