Doreen rewarded him for this speech with a humorous look, in which there was something of gratitude, but more of rebellion.

“Accommodate myself?  No, I couldn’t.  I think, do you know, that if I were ever foolish enough to marry—­and it would be foolishness in a spoiled creature like me—­I should want a husband who could accommodate himself to me.  Now, you couldn’t.  Clergymen never accommodate themselves to anything or anybody.”

The Reverend Lisle Lindsay did at last look rather disconcerted.  Mischievous Doreen saw her triumph and made the most of it.

“So that settles the matter, doesn’t it?  I can’t accommodate myself; you can’t either.  What could possibly come of a union like that?”

“The greatest happiness this world is capable of affording, and the hope of a happiness more abiding hereafter,” said he; “all the happiness that a true woman can bring to the man she loves.”

Doreen threw up her head quickly.

“Ah! that’s just it,” cried she. “‘To the man she loves!’ But you are not the man I love, Mr. Lindsay.  I suppose it’s one of the things I ought not to do—­one of the unconventional and so unchristian things—­to own that I love a man who doesn’t love me.  But I do.  Now, you know who it is, and everybody knows; but, for all that, you mustn’t tell; you must keep it as a secret that Doreen Wedmore—­proud, stuck-up Doreen—­is breaking her heart for the sake of a man who—­who—­” Her voice broke and she paused for a moment to recover herself; then she said, in a lighter tone:  “Ah, well, we mustn’t be hard upon him, either, for we don’t know—­it’s so difficult to know.”

She sprang up from her seat; and the curate rose too.  By her tactful mention of her own unlucky love she had softened the blow of her rejection of him.  She had been rather too kind indeed, considering the tenacity of the person she had to deal with; for the curate considered his case by no means so hopeless as it was; and instead of taking himself off forlornly, as she would have wished, he stayed on until the young men swarmed up from the billiard-room and bore the whole party down to the hall.

Mr. Wedmore, in great glee at having carried his point in the face of the family resistance, led Mrs. Hutchinson down stairs, and then handed her over to Max, while he himself threw open the door leading to the servants’ quarters, and invited the group of neat maids and stalwart young men from the garden and stable to enter.

But here there was a hitch in the arrangements.  The cook, in a bad temper, smarting with disapproval of the whole business, had refused to join the others, and, as nothing could be done without her, Mr. Wedmore had to penetrate into the servants’ hall, where he found her sitting in state, and, luckily, dressed for the occasion.

Never in his life had Mr. Wedmore exerted himself so much to please any woman as he now did to soften the outraged feelings of the cook, who was a stout, red-faced woman, whose days of comeliness and charm were long since gone by.  He at last succeeded in inducing her to accompany him to the hall, where he arrived in triumph, with a flushed face and nervous manner, after an interval which had been put to great advantage by the younger gentlemen of the party, who were all anxious to dance with the prettiest housemaid.