form on the road, and walking beside him to the Hall.  Her words?  What have they been?  She had not uttered words, she had shed meanings.  He did not for an instant conceive that he had charmed her:  the charm she had cast on him was too thrilling for coxcombry to lift a head; still she had enjoyed his prattle.  In return for her touch upon the Irish fountain in him, he had manifestly given her relief And could not one see that so sprightly a girl would soon be deadened by a man like Willoughby?  Deadened she was:  she had not responded to a compliment on her approaching marriage.  An allusion to it killed her smiling.  The case of Mr. Flitch, with the half wager about his reinstation in the service of the Hall, was conclusive evidence of her opinion of Willoughby.

It became again necessary that he should abuse Willoughby for his folly.  Why was the man worrying her?  In some way he was worrying her.

What if Willoughby as well as Miss Middleton wished to be quit of the engagement? . . .

For just a second, the handsome, woman-flattered officer proved his man’s heart more whole than he supposed it.  That great organ, instead of leaping at the thought, suffered a check.

Bear in mind that his heart was not merely man’s, it was a conqueror’s.  He was of the race of amorous heroes who glory in pursuing, overtaking, subduing:  wresting the prize from a rival, having her ripe from exquisitely feminine inward conflicts, plucking her out of resistance in good old primitive fashion.  You win the creature in her delicious flutterings.  He liked her thus, in cooler blood, because of society’s admiration of the capturer, and somewhat because of the strife, which always enhances the value of a prize, and refreshes our vanity in recollection.

Moreover, he had been matched against Willoughby:  the circumstance had occurred two or three times.  He could name a lady he had won, a lady he had lost.  Willoughby’s large fortune and grandeur of style had given him advantages at the start.  But the start often means the race—­with women, and a bit of luck.

The gentle check upon the galloping heart of Colonel De Craye endured no longer than a second—­a simple side-glance in a headlong pace.  Clara’s enchantingness for a temperament like his, which is to say, for him specially, in part through the testimony her conquest of himself presented as to her power of sway over the universal heart known as man’s, assured him she was worth winning even from a hand that dropped her.

He had now a double reason for exclaiming at the folly of Willoughby.  Willoughby’s treatment of her showed either temper or weariness.  Vanity and judgement led De Craye to guess the former.  Regarding her sentiments for Willoughby, he had come to his own conclusion.  The certainty of it caused him to assume that he possessed an absolute knowledge of her character:  she was an angel, born supple; she was a heavenly soul, with half a dozen of the tricks of earth.  Skittish filly was among his phrases; but she had a bearing and a gaze that forbade the dip in the common gutter for wherewithal to paint the creature she was.