Haddington was a little at loss.

“Indeed, you’re wholly wrong.  Lady Claudia.  Indeed, if you come to that, I don’t see that they are particularly rapturous.”

“You don’t mean you think they’re unhappy?  Mr. Haddington, I am so grieved!”

“Do you mean to say you don’t agree with me?”

“You mustn’t ask me.  But, oh!  I’m so sorry you think so too.  Isn’t it strange?  So suited to one another—­she so beautiful, he so clever, and both rich!”

“Miss Bernard is hardly rich, is she?”

“Not as Mr. Lane is, of course.  She seems rich to me—­forty thousand pounds, I think.  Ah, Mr. Haddington, if only you had met her sooner!”

“I shouldn’t have had much chance against Lane.”

“Why do you say that?  If you only knew—­”

“What?”

“I mustn’t tell you.  How sad that it’s too late!”

“Is it?”

“Of course.  They’re engaged!”

“An engagement isn’t a marriage.  If I thought—­”

“Yes?”

“But I can’t think of that now.  Good-by, Claudia.  We may not meet again.”

“Oh, you won’t go away?  You mustn’t let me drive you away.  Oh, please, Mr. Haddington!  Think, if you go, it must all come out!  I should be so very, very distressed.”

“If you ask me, I will try to stay.”

“Yes, yes, stay—­but forget all this.  And never think again of the other—­about them, I mean.  You will stay?”

“Yes, I will stay,” said Haddington.

“Unless it makes you too unhappy to see Eugene’s triumph in Kate’s love?”

“I don’t believe much in that.  If that’s the only thing—­but I must go.  I see your brother coming up the hill.”

“Yes, go; and I’ll never tell that you tried me as—­as a second string!”

“That’s very unjust!” he protested, but more weakly.

“No, it isn’t.  I know your heart, and I do pity you.”

“Perhaps I shall not ask for pity, Lady Claudia!”

“Oh, you mustn’t think of that!”

“It was you who put it in my head.”

“Oh, what have I done!”

Haddington smiled, and with a last squeeze of her hand turned and walked away.

Claudia put her handkerchief into her pocket and went to meet her brother.

Haddington returned alone to the house.  Although suffering under a natural feeling of annoyance at discovering that he was not foremost in Claudia’s heart, as he had led himself to suppose, he was yet keenly alive to the fact that the interview had its consolatory aspect.  In the first place, there is a fiction that a lady who respects herself does not fall in love with a man whom she suspects to be in love with somebody else; and Haddington’s mind, though of no mean order in some ways, was not of a sort to rise above fictions.  He comforted his vanity with the thought that Claudia had, by a conscious effort, checked a nascent affection for him, which, if allowed unimpeded growth, would have