This was on the evening Roger Stapylton gave the long-anticipated dinner at which he was to announce his daughter’s engagement.  As much indeed was suspected by most of his dinner-company, so carefully selected from the aristocracy of Lichfield; and the heart of the former overseer, as these handsome, courtly and sweet voiced people settled according to their rank about his sumptuous table, was aglow with pride.

Then Rudolph Musgrave turned to his companion and said softly:  “My dear, you are like a wraith.  What is it?”

“I have a headache,” said Patricia.  “It is nothing.”

“You reassure me,” the colonel gaily declared, “for I had feared it was a heartache—­”

She faced him.  Desperation looked out of her purple eyes.  “It is,” the girl said swiftly.

“Ah—?” Only it was an intake of the breath, rather than an interjection.  Colonel Musgrave ate his fish with deliberation.  “Young Parkinson?” he presently suggested.

“I thought I had forgotten him.  I didn’t know I cared—­I didn’t know I could care so much—­” And there was a note in her voice which thrust the poor colonel into an abyss of consternation.

“Remember that these people are your guests,” he said, in perfect earnest.

“—­and I refused him this afternoon for the last time, and he is going away to-morrow—­”

But here Judge Allardyce broke in, to tell Miss Stapylton of the pleasure with which he had nolle prosequied the case against Tom Bellingham.

“A son of my old schoolmate, ma’am,” the judge explained.  “A Bellingham of Assequin.  Oh, indiscreet of course—­but, God bless my soul! when were the Bellinghams anything else?  The boy regretted it as much as anybody.”

And she listened with almost morbid curiosity concerning the finer details of legal intricacy.

Colonel Musgrave was mid-course in an anecdote which the lady upon the other side of him found wickedly amusing.

He was very gay.  He had presently secured the attention of the company at large, and held it through a good half-hour; for by common consent Rudolph Musgrave was at his best to-night, and Lichfield found his best worth listening to.

“Grinning old popinjay!” thought Mr. Parkinson; and envied him and internally noted, and with an unholy fervor cursed, the adroitness of intonation and the discreetly modulated gesture with which the colonel gave to every point of his merry-Andrewing its precise value.

The colonel’s mind was working busily on matters oddly apart from those of which he talked.  He wanted this girl next to him—­at whom he did not look.  He loved her as that whippersnapper yonder was not capable of loving anyone.  Young people had these fancies; and they outlived them, as the colonel knew of his own experience.  Let matters take their course unhindered, at all events by him.  For it was less his part than that of any other man alive to interfere when Rudolph Musgrave stood within a finger’s reach of, at worst, his own prosperity and happiness.