Major Campbell stood for full five minutes; not as one astounded, but as one in deep and anxious thought.

“What can be the matter, mon Saint Pere?” asked she at last, to break the silence.

“That there are more whims in the world than yours, dear Queen Whims; and I fear darker ones.  Let us walk up together after this man.  I have offended him.”

“Nonsense!  I dare say he wanted to get home to write poetry, as you did not praise what he had written.  I know his vanity and flightiness.”

“You do?” asked he quickly, in a painful tone.  “However, I have offended him, I can see; and deeply.  I must go up, and make things right, for the sake of—­for everybody’s sake.”

“Then do not ask me anything.  Lucia loves him intensely, and let that be enough for us.”

The Major saw the truth of the last sentence no more than Valencia herself did; for Valencia would have been glad enough to pour out to him, with every exaggeration, her sister’s woes and wrongs, real and fancied, had not the sense of her own folly with Vavasour kept her silent and conscience-stricken.

Valencia remarked the Major’s pained look as they walked up the street.

“You dear conscientious Saint Pere, why will you fret yourself about this foolish matter?  He will have forgotten it all in an hour; I know him well enough.”

Major Campbell was not the sort of person to admire Elsley the more for throwing away capriciously such deep passion as he had seen him show, any more than for showing the same.

“He must be of a very volatile temperament.”

“Oh, all geniuses are.”

“I have no respect for genius, Miss St. Just; I do not even acknowledge its existence when there is no strength and steadiness of character.  If any one pretends to be more than a man, he must begin by proving himself a man at all.  Genius?  Give me common sense and common decency!  Does he give Mrs. Vavasour, pray, the benefit of any of these pretty flights of genius?”

Valencia was frightened.  She had never heard her Saint Pere speak so severely and sarcastically; and she feared that if he knew the truth he would be terribly angry.  She had never seen him angry; but she knew well enough that that passion, when it rose in him in a righteous cause, would be very awful to see; and she was one of those women who always grow angry when they are frightened.  So she was angry at his calling her Miss St. Just; she was angry because she chose to think he was talking at her; though she reasonably might have guessed it, seeing that he had scolded her a hundred times for want of steadiness of character.  She was more angry than all, because she knew that her own vanity had caused—­at least disagreement—­between Lucia and Elsley.  All which (combined with her natural wish not to confess an unpleasant truth about her sister) justified her, of course, in answering,—­

“Miss St. Just does not intrude into the secrets of her sister’s married life; and if she did, she would not repeat them.”