COUSIN PHILLIS. 51
"Well," said he, after a pause. "It's but a few days I've been thinking of it, but I'd got as fond of my notion as if it had been a new engine as I'd been planning out. Here's our Paul, thinks I to myself, a good sensible breed o' lad, as has never vexed or troubled his mother or me; with a good business opening out before him, age nineteen, not so bad-looking, though perhaps not to call handsome, and here's his cousin, not too near a cousin, but just nice, as one may say; aged seventeen, good and true, and well brought up to work with her hands as well as her head; a scholar — but that can't be helped, and is more her misfortune than her fault, seeing she is the only child of a scholar — and as I said afore, once she's a wife and a mother she'll forget it all, I'll be bound — with a good fortune in land and house when it shall please the Lord to take her parents to himself; with eyes like poor Molly's for beauty, a colour that comes and goes on a milk-white skin, and as pretty a mouth-"
"Why, Mr. Manning, what fair lady are you describing?" asked Mr. Holdsworth, who had come quickly and suddenly upon our tête-à-tête, and had caught my father's last words as he entered the room.
Both my father and I felt rather abashed; it was such an odd subject for us to be talking about; but my father, like a straightforward simple man as he was, spoke out the truth.
"I've been telling Paul of Ellison's offer, and saying how good an opening it made for him—"
"I wish I'd as good," said Mr. Holdsworth. "But has the business a 'pretty mouth?'"
"You're always so full of your joking, Mr. Holds-
