parson of Tripton, and once there, it had been easy to negotiate a surreptitious meeting with Beatrice.  The fields and the lanes are everybody’s property.  If Tom and Maria are caught love-making at the stile out of the wood, and they both swear that the meeting was purely accidental, I don’t see how any one is to prove that it was premeditated; nor can any parents, now that it is no longer the fashion to keep grown women under lock and key, prevent their daughters from going out in the country occasionally unattended, nor forbid strange young men from walking along the Queen’s highway in the same direction.

But remove your daughter to London, and the case is altered at once.  To keep a girl who goes out a great deal in the whirl of London society out of the way of a man who goes out very little, who is not in the inner circle of town life, and is not in the same set as herself, is the easiest thing in the world.

So Mrs. Miller found it.  She kept Beatrice hard at work at the routine of dissipation.  Not an hour of her time was unoccupied, not a minute of her day unaccounted for; and, of course, she was never alone—­it is not yet the fashion for young girls to dance about London by themselves—­her mother, as a matter of course, was always with her.

As a natural sequence, the lovers had a hard time of it.  Beatrice had been six weeks in London, and Herbert, beyond catching sight of her once or twice as she was driven past in her mother’s carriage down Bond Street, or through the crowd in the Park, had never seen her at all.

Mrs. Miller was congratulating herself upon the success of her tactics; she flattered herself that her daughter was completely getting over that unlucky fancy for the penniless and briefless barrister.  Beatrice gave no sign; she appeared perfectly satisfied and contented, and seemed to be enjoying herself thoroughly, and to be troubled by no love-sick hankerings after her absent swain.

“She has forgotten him,” said Mrs. Miller, to herself.

But the mother did not take into account that indomitable spirit and stubborn determination in her own character which had served to carry out successfully all the schemes of her life, and which she had probably transmitted to her child.

In Beatrice’s head, under its short thick thatch of dark rough hair, and in her sturdily-built little frame, there lurked the tenacity of a bulldog.  Once she had taken an idea firmly into her mind, Beatrice Miller would never relinquish it until she had got her own way.  Herbert, in the dingy solitude of his untempting chambers, might despair and look upon life and its aims as a hopeless enigma.  Beatrice did not despair at all.  She only bided her time.

One day, if she waited for it patiently, the opportunity would come to her, and when it came she would not be slow to make use of it.  It came to her in the shape of a morning visit from Captain Maurice Kynaston.