‘My feelings are beyond my control,’ he replied; ’they are, and must ever be, totally independent of my opinions.’

Lady Annabel did not reply.  His lordship felt baffled, but he was resolved to make one more effort.

‘Do you know,’ he said, ’I can scarcely believe myself in London to-day?  To be sitting next to you, to see Miss Herbert, to hear Dr. Masham’s voice.  Oh! does it not recall Cherbury, or Marringhurst, or that day at Cadurcis, when you were so good as to smile over my rough repast?  Ah!  Lady Annabel, those days were happy! those were feelings that can never die!  All the glitter and hubbub of the world can never make me forget them, can never make you, I hope, Lady Annabel, quite recall them with an effort.  We were friends then:  let us be friends now.’

‘I am too old to cultivate new friendships,’ said Lady Annabel; ’and if we are to be friends, Lord Cadurcis, I am sorry to say that, after the interval that has occurred since we last parted, we should have to begin again.’

‘It is a long time,’ said Cadurcis, mournfully, ’a very long time, and one, in spite of what the world may think, to which I cannot look back with any self-congratulation.  I wished three years ago never to leave Cadurcis again.  Indeed I did; and indeed it was not my fault that I quitted it.’

’It was no one’s fault, I hope.  Whatever the cause may have been, I have ever remained quite ignorant of it.  I wished, and wish, to remain ignorant of it.  I, for one, have ever considered it the wise dispensation of a merciful Providence.’

Cadurcis ground his teeth; a dark look came over him which, when once it rose on his brow, was with difficulty dispelled; and for the remainder of the dinner he continued silent and gloomy.

He was, however, not unobserved by Venetia.  She had watched his evident attempts to conciliate her mother with lively interest; she had witnessed their failure with sincere sorrow.  In spite of that stormy interview, the results of which, in his hasty departure, and the severance of their acquaintance, she had often regretted, she had always retained for him the greatest affection.  During these three years he had still, in her inmost heart, remained her own Plantagenet, her adopted brother, whom she loved, and in whose welfare her feelings were deeply involved.  The mysterious circumstances of her birth, and the discoveries to which they had led, had filled her mind with a fanciful picture of human nature, over which she had long brooded.  A great poet had become her ideal of a man.  Sometimes she had sighed, when musing over her father and Plantagenet on the solitary seashore at Weymouth, that Cadurcis, instead of being the merely amiable, and somewhat narrow-minded being that she supposed, had not been invested with those brilliant and commanding qualities which she felt could alone master her esteem.  Often had she, in those abstracted hours, played with her imagination