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Rh ineffectually sought to do it for you? Well, I am a million times delighted; tell me quick!'

'I will, Pierre. You very well know, that from the first hour you apprised me—or rather, from a period prior to that—from the moment that I, by my own insight, became aware of your love for Lucy, I have always approved it. Lucy is a delicious girl; of honourable descent, a fortune, well-bred, and the very pattern of all that I think amiable and attractive in a girl of seventeen.'

'Well, well, well,' cried Pierre rapidly and impetuously; 'we both knew that before.'

'Well, well, well, Pierre,' retorted his mother, mockingly.

'It is not well, well, well; but ill, ill, ill, to torture me so, mother; go on, do!'

'But notwithstanding my admiring approval of your choice, Pierre; yet, as you know, I have resisted your entreaties for my consent to your speedy marriage, because I thought that a girl of scarcely seventeen, and a boy scarcely twenty, should not be in such a hurry;—there was plenty of time, I thought, which could be profitably employed by both.'

'Permit me here to interrupt you, mother. Whatever you may have seen in me; she,—I mean Lucy,—has never been in the slightest hurry to be married;—that's all. But I shall regard it as a 'lapsus-lingua' in you.'

'Undoubtedly, a lapsus. But listen to me. I have been carefully observing both you and Lucy of late; and that has made me think further of the matter. Now, Pierre, if you were in any profession, or in any business at all; nay, if I were a farmer's wife and you my child, working in my fields; why, then, you and Lucy should still wait awhile. But as you have nothing to do but to think of Lucy by day, and dream of her by night, and as she is in the same predicament, I suppose,