“She dresses very simply herself.”

“But it becomes her.  She is one of the few women whom I feel I could not improve with a touch.”

“She has judgement.”

He reflected and repeated his encomium.

The shadow of a dimple in Clara’s cheek awakened him to the idea that she had struck him somewhere:  and certainly he would never again be able to put up the fiction of her jealousy of Laetitia.  What, then, could be this girl’s motive for praying to be released?  The interrogation humbled him:  he fled from the answer.

Willoughby went in search of De Craye.  That sprightly intriguer had no intention to let himself be caught solus.  He was undiscoverable until the assembly sounded, when Clara dropped a public word or two, and he spoke in perfect harmony with her.  After that, he gave his company to Willoughby for an hour at billiards, and was well beaten.

The announcement of a visit of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson took the gentlemen to the drawing-room, rather suspecting that something stood in the way of her dinner-party.  As it happened, she was lamenting only the loss of one of the jewels of the party:  to wit, the great Professor Crooklyn, invited to meet Dr. Middleton at her table; and she related how she had driven to the station by appointment, the professor being notoriously a bother-headed traveller:  as was shown by the fact that he had missed his train in town, for he had not arrived; nothing had been seen of him.  She cited Vernon Whitford for her authority that the train had been inspected, and the platform scoured to find the professor.

“And so,” said she, “I drove home your Green Man to dry him; he was wet through and chattering; the man was exactly like a skeleton wrapped in a sponge, and if he escapes a cold he must be as invulnerable as he boasts himself.  These athletes are terrible boasters.”

“They climb their Alps to crow,” said Clara, excited by her apprehension that Mrs. Mountstuart would speak of having seen the colonel near the station.

There was a laugh, and Colonel De Craye laughed loudly as it flashed through him that a quick-witted impressionable girl like Miss Middleton must, before his arrival at the Hall, have speculated on such obdurate clay as Vernon Whitford was, with humourous despair at his uselessness to her.  Glancing round, he saw Vernon standing fixed in a stare at the young lady.

“You heard that, Whitford?” he said, and Clara’s face betokening an extremer contrition than he thought was demanded, the colonel rallied the Alpine climber for striving to be the tallest of them—­Signor Excelsior!—­and described these conquerors of mountains pancaked on the rocks in desperate embraces, bleached here, burned there, barked all over, all to be able to say they had been up “so high”—­had conquered another mountain!  He was extravagantly funny and self-satisfied:  a conqueror of the sex having such different rewards of enterprise.