"I'm not offering you any grand chance, Mary Anne; for I'm about as low down in the world as a man can be.

But I don't mean to be poor all my life.

Come, my dear, don't cry," he exclaimed, just a little impatiently--for the girl had covered her face with her hands, and tears were dropping between the poor hard-working fingers--"but lift up your head and tell me whether you will take a faded old bachelor for your husband or not." Horatio Paget had admired many women in the bright years of his youth, and had fancied himself desperately in love more than once in his life; but it is doubtful whether the mighty passion had ever really possessed the Captain's heart, which was naturally cold and sluggish, rarely fluttered by any emotion that was not engendered of selfishness.
Horatio had set up an idol and had invented a religion for himself very early in life; and that idol was fashioned after his own image, and that religion had its beginning and end in his own pleasure.

He might have been flattered and pleased by Miss Kepp's agitation; but he was ill and peevish; and having all his life been subject to a profound antipathy to feminine tearfulness, the girl's display of emotion annoyed him.
"Is it to be yes, or no, my dear ?" he asked, with, some vexation in his tone.
Mary Anne looked up at him with tearful, frightened eyes.
"O, yes, sir, if I can be of any use to you, and nurse you when you are ill, and work for you till I work my fingers to the bone." She clenched her hands spasmodically as she spoke.

In imagination she was already toiling and striving for the god of her idolatry--the GENTLEMAN whose varnished boots had been to her as a glimpse of another and a fairer world than that represented by Tulliver's-terrace, Old Kent-road.