But these difficulties, whatever they might be, must be overcome.

When he had told himself this, then he allowed his mind to settle itself on Nora Rowley.
Hitherto he had known Miss Rowley only as a fashionable girl living with the wife of an intimate friend of his own in London.

He had never been staying in the same house with her.

Circumstances had never given to him the opportunity of assuming the manner of an intimate friend, justifying him in giving advice, and authorising him to assume that semi-paternal tone which is by far the easiest preliminary to love-making.

When a man can tell a young lady what she ought to read, what she ought to do, and whom she ought to know, nothing can be easier than to assure her that, of all her duties, her first duty is to prefer himself to all the world.