Those horrible accounts!  And a master!  Who said Marlboro’ was a master?  What thing was Earl St. George Erne?—­Yet too untaught to teach, too finely bred to sew, too delicate to labor, perhaps not good enough to starve,—­

A quarter of an hour elapsed in dead silence.

Eloise threw back her head, and grew just a trifle more queenly, as she answered,—­

“I thank you.  I will stay, Mr. Erne.”

The last word had tripped on her tongue; it had been almost impossible for her to give to another person her father’s name, which she had never been allowed to wear herself.

He noticed her hesitation, and said,—­

“You can call me St. George.  Everybody does,—­Mrs. Arles, the servants will.  We have always been the St. Georges and the Disbrowes, for generations.  Besides, if you had really been my cousin’s child, you would naturally have called me so.”

“If I had really been your cousin’s child, Sir,” said Eloise, with a flash, “I should not have been obliged to call you at all!”

This finished the business.  Mr. St. George, who felt, that, in reality, he had only got his right again, who would gladly have given her back hers, who had only, in completest innocence and ignorance, made it impossible for her, in pride and honor, to accept it, who, moreover, very naturally considered his treatment of this handsome, disagreeable girl rather generous, and who had sacrificed much of his usually dictatorial manner in the conversation, felt also now that there was nothing more to do till she chose her ice should melt; and so he straightway let a frosty mood build itself up on his part into the very counterpart of hers.  The resolution which he had just made, boyishly to abstract himself in secret, and leave her to fate and necessity and duty, faded.  She deserved to lose.  A haughty, ungovernable hussy!  He would keep it in spite of her!  How, under the sun, had his Cousin Disbrowe got along with her?  Nevertheless, the salary which Mr. St. George had privately allotted to his accountant covered exactly one-half of his yearly income, whatever that contingent fund might prove to be; and, meantime, he did not intend to pay her a copper of it until they should become so much better friends that it would be impossible for her, with all her waywardness, to refuse it.

A bell sounded.  Hazel came, and murmured something to Eloise.  And thereupon, in this sweet and cordial frame of mind, they entered the breakfast-room, where Mrs. Arles awaited them behind a hissing urn,—­and a cheery meal they had of it!