a year, and he, the Archdeacon, was not going to raise any difficulties whether on the score of the young man's social position or his lack of intelligence or anything else. And if he lived in America, why, so much the better.
The news, therefore, that the girl had engaged herself—actually engaged herself to this cheap poet, this decadent, unsubstantial organ-grinder of a Dunkle, impressed the Archdeacon very disagreeably. That Chloë should be engaged was good, since it was a step in the direction of her departure from her girlhood's home; but that she should be engaged to a man with only three hundred and sixpence a year was bad, very. As for the proposal that he, her father, should endow her with an income of seven hundred pounds, it was satisfactorily susceptible of characterisation in no single form of words which the Arch-
