* * * * *

The transition from this train of thought to that bearing on Beatrice was not a difficult one; for the memory of the girl was continually in his mind.  He had seen her half a dozen times now since their first meeting; for he had availed himself to the full of Cromwell’s encouragement to make himself at home at Chelsea; and he found that his interest in her deepened every time.  With a touch of amusement he found himself studying Horace and Terence again, not only for Sir Thomas More’s benefit, but in order to win his approval and his good report to his household, among whom Beatrice was practically to be reckoned.

He was pleased too by More’s account of Beatrice.

“She is nearly as good a scholar as my dear Meg,” he had said one day.  “Try her, Mr. Torridon.”

Ralph had carefully prepared an apt quotation that day, and fired it off presently, not at Beatrice, but, as it were, across her; but there was not the faintest response or the quiver of an eyelid.

There was silence a moment; and then Sir Thomas burst out—­

“You need not look so demure, my child; we all know that you understand.”

Beatrice had given him a look of tranquil amusement in return.

“I will not be made a show of,” she said.

Ralph went away that day more engrossed than ever.  He began to ask himself where his interest in her would end; and wondered at its intensity.

As he questioned himself about it, it seemed that to him it was to a great extent her appearance of detached self-possession that attracted him.  It was the quality that he most desired for himself, and one which he had in measure attained; but he was aware that in the presence of Cromwell at least it deserted him.  He knew well that he had found his master there, and that he himself was nothing more than a hero-worshipper before a shrine; but it provoked him to feel that there was no one who seemed to occupy the place of a similar divinity with regard to this girl.  Obviously she admired and loved Sir Thomas More—­Ralph soon found out how deeply in the course of his visits—­but she was not in the least afraid of her friend.  She serenely contradicted him when she disagreed with what he said, would fail to keep her appointments at his house with the same equanimity, and in spite of Sir Thomas’s personality never appeared to give him more than a friendly and affectionate homage.  With regard to Ralph himself, it was the same.  She was not in the least awed by him, or apparently impressed by his reputation which at this time was growing rapidly as that of a capable and daring agent of Cromwell’s; and even once or twice when he condescended to hint at the vastness of the affairs on which he was engaged, in a desperate endeavour to rouse her admiration, she only looked at him steadily a moment with very penetrating eyes, and began to speak of something else.  He began to feel discouraged.