On the next morning, at eleven o’clock, he knocked at Mrs. Mountjoy’s house in Mountpellier Place and asked for the elder lady.  Mrs. Mountjoy was out, and Harry at once inquired for Florence.  The servant at first seemed to hesitate, but at last showed Harry into the dining-room.  There he waited five minutes, which seemed to him to be half an hour, and then Florence came to him.  “Your mother is not at home,” he said, putting out his hand.

“No, Mr. Annesley, but I think she will be back soon.  Will you wait for her?”

“I do not know whether I am not glad that she should be out.  Florence, I have something that I must tell you.”

“Something that you must tell me!”

He had called her Florence once before, on a happy afternoon which he well remembered, but he was not thinking of that now.  Her name, which was always in his mind, had come to him naturally, as though he had no time to pick and choose about names in the importance of the communication which he had to make.  “Yes.  I don’t believe that you were ever really engaged to your cousin Mountjoy.”

“No, I never was,” she answered, briskly.  Harry Annesley was certainly a handsome man, but no young man living ever thought less of his own beauty.  He had fair, wavy hair, which he was always submitting to some barber, very much to the unexpressed disgust of poor Florence; because to her eyes the longer the hair grew the more beautiful was the wearer of it.  His forehead, and eyes, and nose were all perfect in their form—­

  “Hyperion’s curls; the front of Jove himself;
  An eye like Mars, to threaten and command.”

There was a peculiar brightness in his eye, which would have seemed to denote something absolutely great in his character had it not been for the wavering indecision of his mouth.  There was as it were a vacillation in his lips which took away from the manliness of his physiognomy.  Florence, who regarded his face as almost divine, was yet conscious of some weakness about his mouth which she did not know how to interpret.  But yet, without knowing why it was so, she was accustomed to expect from him doubtful words, half expressed words, which would not declare to her his perfected thoughts—­as she would have them declared.  He was six feet high, but neither broad nor narrow, nor fat nor thin, but a very Apollo in Florence’s eye.  To the elders who knew him the quintessence of his beauty lay in the fact that he was altogether unconscious of it.  He was a man who counted nothing on his personal appearance for the performance of those deeds which he was most anxious to achieve.  The one achievement now essentially necessary to his happiness was the possession of Florence Mountjoy; but it certainly never occurred to him that he was more likely to obtain this because he was six feet high, or because his hair waved becomingly.

“I have supposed so,” he said, in answer to her last assertion.