“How is it that you avoid me as you do, and will not allow me one moment’s speech with you?  You are driving me to distraction.”

“Why, you foolish man!” she answered, half playfully, pressing the palms of her little hands together, and looking up in his face, “how can I?  Don’t you see how those two dear old ladies swallow me up in their faddles?  Oh, dear!  Oh, dear!  I wish they would go.  Then it would be all right again —­ wouldn’t it?”

But Hugh was not to be so easily satisfied.

“Before they came, ever since that night —­”

“Hush-sh!” she interrupted, putting her finger on his lips, and looking hurriedly round her with an air of fright, of which he could hardly judge whether it was real or assumed —­ “hush!”

Comforted wondrously by the hushing finger, Hugh would yet understand more.

“I am no baby, dear Euphra,” he said, taking hold of the hand to which the finger belonged, and laying it on his mouth; “do not make one of me.  There is some mystery in all this —­ at least something I do not understand.”

“I will tell you all about it one day.  But, seriously, you must be careful how you behave to me; for if my uncle should, but for one moment, entertain a suspicion —­ good-bye to you —­ perhaps good-bye to Arnstead.  All my influence with him comes from his thinking that I like him better than anybody else.  So you must not make the poor old man jealous.  By the bye,” she went on —­ rapidly, as if she would turn the current of the conversation aside —­ “what a favourite you have grown with him!  You should have heard him talk of you to the old ladies.  I might well be jealous of you.  There never was a tutor like his.”

Hugh’s heart smote him that the praise of even this common man, proud of his own vanity, should be undeserved by him.  He was troubled, too, at the flippancy with which Euphra spoke; yet not the less did he feel that he loved her passionately.

“I daresay,” he replied, “he praised me as he would anything else that happened to be his.  Isn’t that old bay horse of his the best hack in the county?”

“You naughty man!  Are you going to be satirical?”

“You claim that as your privilege, do you?”

“Worse and worse!  I will not talk to you.  But, seriously, for I must go —­ bring your Italian to —­ to —­” She hesitated.

“To the library —­ why not?” suggested Hugh.

“No-o,” she answered, shaking her head, and looking quite solemn.

“Well, will you come to my study?  Will that please you better?”

“Yes, I will,” she answered, with a definitive tone.  “Good-bye, now.”

She opened the door, and having looked out to see that no one was passing, told him to go.  As he went, he felt as if the oaken floor were elastic beneath his tread.