“I won’t have you so idle, Harry,” Mrs. Burton said to him one day.  “You know you ought to be at your office now.”  It must be admitted, on behalf of Harry Clavering, that they who liked him, especially women, were able to become intimate with him very easily.  He had comfortable, homely ways about him, and did not habitually give himself airs.  He had become quite domesticated at the Burtons’ house during the ten weeks that he had been in London, and knew his way to Onslow Crescent almost too well.  It may, perhaps, be surmised correctly that he would not have gone there so frequently if Mrs. Theodore Burton had been an ugly woman.

“It’s all her fault,” said he, continuing to snip a piece of worsted with a pair of scissors as he spoke.  “She’s too prudent by half.”

“Poor Florence!”

“You can’t but know that I should work three times as much if she had given me a different answer.  It stands to reason any man would work under such circumstances as that.  Not that I am idle, I believe.  I do as much as any other man about the place.”

“I won’t have my worsted destroyed all the same.  Theodore says that Florence is right.”

“Of course he does; of course he’ll say I’m wrong.  I won’t ask her again—­that’s all.”

“Oh, Harry! don’t say that.  You know you’ll ask her.  You would to-morrow, if she were here.”

“You don’t know me, Cecilia, or you would not say so.  When I have made up my mind to a thing, I am generally firm about it.  She said something about two years, and I will not say a word to alter that decision.  If it be altered, it shall be altered by her.”

In the meantime he punished Florence by sending her no special answer to her letter.  He wrote to her as usual; but he made no reference to his last proposal, nor to her refusal.  She had asked him to tell her that he was not angry, but he would tell her nothing of the kind.  He told her when and where and how he would meet her, and convey her from Stratton to Clavering; gave her some account of a play he had seen; described a little dinner-party in Onslow Crescent; and told her a funny story about Mr. Walliker and the office at the Adelphi.  But he said no word, even in rebuke, as to her decision about their marriage.  He intended that this should be felt to be severe, and took pleasure in the pain that he would be giving.  Florence, when she received her letter, knew that he was sore, and understood thoroughly the working of his mind.  “I will comfort him when we are together,” she said to herself.  “I will make him reasonable when I see him.”  It was not the way in which he expected that his anger would be received.