“He wants me to do so, but I don’t think I can.”

“Why not?  It would be happier for you, child; forget the past and begin afresh.  He is a good boy, and by-and-by he will be well off.”

“You, too—­you advise me to do this?” she answered with unwonted bitterness.  “Oh, how wise and calculating one ought to be to live happily in this miserable world!”

He looked pained.

“I cannot do you any good,” he said, rather brokenly.  “God knows I would if I could.  I can only be a curse to you.  Give me at least the credit of unselfishly wishing you to be less unhappy than you are.”

And then the crowd, moving onwards, parted them from each other.

“Do not forget to meet me at the Bath,” she called out to him as he went.

“Oh, to be sure!  I had forgotten.  I will be there just before the dancing begins.”

And then Denis Wilde took his place by her side.

If Mrs. Kynaston surpassed herself in looks and animation that day, Vera, on the contrary, had never looked less well.

Her eyes were heavy with sleepless nights and many tears; her movements were slower and more languid than of wont, and her face was pale and thin.

Meadowshire generally, that had ceased to trouble itself much about her when she had thrown over the richest baronet in the county, considered itself, nevertheless, to be somewhat aggrieved by the falling off in her appearance, and passed its appropriate and ill-natured comments upon the fact.

“How ill she looks,” said one woman to another.

“Positively old.  I suppose she thought she could whistle poor Sir John back again whenever she chose; now he is out of the country she would give her eyes for him!”

“I daresay; and looks as if she had cried them out; but he must be glad to have escaped her!  Well, it serves her right for behaving so badly.  I’m sure I don’t pity her.”

“Nor I, indeed.”

And the two amiable women passed onwards to discuss some other ill-fated victim.

But to the two men who loved her Vera that day was as beautiful as ever; for love sees no flaw in the face that reigns supreme in the soul.  And Vera sat still in her corner of the tent where she had taken refuge, and leant her tired, aching head against a gaudy pink-and-white striped pillar.  It was the tent where the flower-show was going on.  From her sheltered nook there was not much that was lovely to be seen, not a vestige of a rose or a carnation to refresh her tired eyes, only a counter covered with samples of potatoes and monster cauliflowers; and there was a slab of white wood with pats of yellow butter, done up in moss and ferns, which had been sent from the principal dairy-farms of the county, and before which there was a constant succession of elderly and interested housewives tasting and comparing notes.  There seemed some difficulty in deciding to whom the butter prize was to be awarded, and at last a committee of ladies was formed; they all tasted, solemnly, of each sample all round, and then they each gave their verdict differently, so that it had all to be done over again amidst a good deal of laughter and merriment.