“What for?  I shan’t go in.”

“Oh, very well.  Then that dandified silk frock for the new year that the dressmaker is waiting to try on can be put aside until midsummer.”

Kate dearly loved new silk frocks, and she raced away.  The governess followed more slowly, Mr. Carradyne talking by her side.

For some months now their love dream had been going on; aye, and the love-making too.  Not altogether surreptitiously; neither of them would have liked that.  Though not expedient to proclaim it yet to Captain Monk and the world, Mrs. Carradyne knew of it and tacitly sanctioned it.

Alice West turned her face, blushing uncomfortably, to him as they walked.  “I am glad to have this opportunity of saying something to you,” she spoke with hesitation.  “Are you not upon rather bad terms with Mrs. Hamlyn?”

“She is with me,” replied Harry.

“And—­am I the cause?” continued Alice, feeling as if her fears were confirmed.

“Not at all.  She has not fathomed the truth yet, with all her penetration, though she may have some suspicion of it.  Eliza wants to bend me to her will in the matter of the house, and I won’t be bent.  Old Peveril wishes to resign the lease of Peacock Range to me; I wish to take it from him, and Eliza objects.  She says Peveril promised her the house until the seven years’ lease was out, and that she means to keep him to his bargain.”

“Do you quarrel?”

“Quarrel! no,” laughed Harry Carradyne.  “I joke with her, rather than quarrel.  But I don’t give in.  She pays me some left-handed compliments, telling me that I am no gentleman, that I’m a bear, and so on; to which I make my bow.”

Alice West was gazing straight before her, a troubled look in her eyes.  “Then you see that I am the remote cause of the quarrel, Harry.  But for thinking of me, you would not care to take the house on your own hands.”

“I don’t know that.  Be very sure of one thing, Alice:  that I shall not stay an hour longer under the roof here if my uncle disinherits me.  That he, a man of indomitable will, should be so long making up his mind is a proof that he shrinks from committing the injustice.  The suspense it keeps me in is the worst of all.  I told him so the other evening when we were sitting together and he was in an amiable mood.  I said that any decision he might come to would be more tolerable than this prolonged suspense.”

Alice drew a long breath at his temerity.

Harry laughed.  “Indeed, I quite expected to be ordered out of the room in a storm.  Instead of that, he took it quietly, civilly telling me to have a little more patience; and then began to speak of the annual new year’s dinner, which is not far off now.”

“Mrs. Carradyne is thinking that he may not hold the dinner this year, as he has been so ill,” remarked the young lady.

“He will never give that up, Alice, as long as he can hold anything; and he is almost well again, you know.  Oh, yes; we shall have the dinner and the chimes also.”