She had to stay beside them:  Clara held her arm.  The colonel’s voice dropped at times to something very like a whisper.  He was answered audibly and smoothly.  The quickwitted gentleman accepted the correction:  but in immediately paying assiduous attentions to Miss Dale, in the approved intriguer’s fashion, he showed himself in need of another amounting to a reproof.  Clara said:  “We have been consulting, Laetitia, what is to be done to cure Professor Crooklyn of his cold.”  De Craye perceived that he had taken a wrong step, and he was mightily surprised that a lesson in intrigue should be read to him of all men.  Miss Middleton’s audacity was not so astonishing:  he recognized grand capabilities in the young lady.  Fearing lest she should proceed further and cut away from him his vantage-ground of secrecy with her, he turned the subject and was adroitly submissive.

Clara’s manner of meeting Sir Willoughby expressed a timid disposition to friendliness upon a veiled inquiry, understood by none save Laetitia, whose brain was racked to convey assurances to herself of her not having misinterpreted him.  Could there be any doubt?  She resolved that there could not be; and it was upon this basis of reason that she fancied she had led him to it.  Legitimate or not, the fancy sprang from a solid foundation.  Yesterday morning she could not have conceived it.  Now she was endowed to feel that she had power to influence him, because now, since the midnight, she felt some emancipation from the spell of his physical mastery.  He did not appear to her as a different man, but she had grown sensible of being a stronger woman.  He was no more the cloud over her, nor the magnet; the cloud once heaven-suffused, the magnet fatally compelling her to sway round to him.  She admired him still:  his handsome air, his fine proportions, the courtesy of his bending to Clara and touching of her hand, excused a fanatical excess of admiration on the part of a woman in her youth, who is never the anatomist of the hero’s lordly graces.  But now she admired him piecemeal.  When it came to the putting of him together, she did it coldly.  To compassionate him was her utmost warmth.  Without conceiving in him anything of the strange old monster of earth which had struck the awakened girl’s mind of Miss Middleton, Laetitia classed him with other men; he was “one of them”.  And she did not bring her disenchantment as a charge against him.  She accused herself, acknowledged the secret of the change to be, and her youthfulness was dead:—­otherwise could she have given him compassion, and not herself have been carried on the flood of it?  The compassion was fervent, and pure too.  She supposed he would supplicate; she saw that Clara Middleton was pleasant with him only for what she expected of his generosity.  She grieved.  Sir Willoughby was fortified by her sorrowful gaze as he and Clara passed out together to the laboratory arm in arm.

Laetitia had to tell Vernon of the uselessness of his beating the house and grounds for Crossjay.  Dr. Middleton held him fast in discussion upon an overnight’s classical wrangle with Professor Crooklyn, which was to be renewed that day.  The Professor had appointed to call expressly to renew it.  “A fine scholar,” said the Rev. Doctor, “but crotchety, like all men who cannot stand their Port.”