“Yes, dear, if you can spare me the time.  Just five minutes will do, and then you can return to your charming sketch.  Oh”—­glancing at it—­“how exactly like it is—­so perfect; what a sunset, and what firs!  One could imagine one’s self in the Fairies’ Glen by just looking at it.”

“It is not the Fairies’ Glen at all; it is that bit down by Gough’s farm,” says Florence coldly.  Of late she has not been so blind to Dora’s artificialness as she used to be.

“Ah, so it is!” agrees Dora airily, not in the least discomposed at her mistake.  “And so like it too.  You are a genius, dearest, you are really, and might make your fortune, only that you have one made already for you, fortunate girl!”

“You want my advice,” suggests Florence quietly.

“Ah, true; and about something important too!” She throws into her whole air so much coquetry mingled with assumed bashfulness that Florence knows by instinct that the “something” has Sir Adrian for its theme, and she grows pale and miserable accordingly.

“Let me hear it then,” she urges, leaning back with a weary sigh.

“I have just received this letter,” says Mrs. Talbot, taking from her pocket the letter Arthur had given her, and holding it out to Florence, “and I want to know how I shall answer it.  Would you—­would you honestly advise me, Flo, to go and meet him as he desires?”

“As who desires?”

“Ah, true; you do not know, of course!  I am so selfishly full of myself and my own concerns, that I seem to think every one else must be full of them too.  Forgive me, dearest, and read his sweet little letter, will you?”

“Of whom are you speaking—­to whose letter do you refer?” asks Florence, a little sharply, in the agony of her heart.

“Florence!  Whose letter would I call ‘sweet’ except Sir Adrian’s?” answers her cousin, with gentle reproach.

“But it is meant for you, not for me,” says Miss Delmaine, holding the letter in her hand, and glancing at it with great distaste.  “He probably intended no other eyes but yours to look upon it.”

“But I must obtain advice from some one, and who so natural to expect it from as you, my nearest relative?  If, however”—­putting her handkerchief to her eyes—­“you object to help me, Florence, or if it distresses you to read—­”

“Distresses me?” interrupts Florence haughtily.  “Why should it distress me?  If you have no objection to my reading your—­lover’s—­letter, why should I hesitate about doing so?  Pray sit down while I run through it.”

Dora having seated herself, Florence hastily reads the false note from beginning to end.  Her heart beats furiously as she does so, and her color comes and goes; but her voice is quite steady when she speaks again.

“Well,” she says, putting the paper from her as though heartily glad to be rid of it, “it seems that Sir Adrian wishes to speak to you on some subject interesting to you and him alone, and that he has chosen the privacy of the lime-walk as the spot in which to hold your tete-a-tete.  It is quite a simple affair, is it not?  Though really, why he could not arrange to talk privately to you in some room in the castle, which is surely large enough for the purpose, I can not understand.”