Henry said he would finish it for her.  He accordingly set to work, and waited quietly till Jael should leave the room, to have it out with Grace.

She, for her part, seemed to have forgotten his strange manner to her the other day; perhaps she chose to forget it, or overlook it.  But Henry observed that Jael was not allowed to quit the room.  Whatever Miss Carden wanted she fetched herself, and came back softly, and rather suddenly, as if she had a mind to surprise Jeel and the other too.  Female subtlety was clearly at work.

“What do you advise me?” said Henry to Jael, during one of these intervals.

Jael never lifted her eyes from her work, and spoke under her breath, “I think I’d be patient to-day.  She must give you a chance to speak some day.  Talk to me, when she comes back—­about the Cairnhope folk, or anything.”

Henry followed this advice, and Grace, for the first time, found herself a little ignored in the conversation.  She was astonished at this and I don’t think she quite liked it.

Henry was still going on with warmth and volubility about the Cairnhope folk, their good hearts, and their superstitions, when a visitor was announced.

“Mr. Coventry.”

Henry stopped in the middle of a sentence.

Grace brightened up, and said she was at home.

Mr. Coventry entered the room; a tall, well-made man, with an aquiline nose, and handsome face, only perhaps there were more lines in it than he was entitled to at his age, for he was barely thirty.  He greeted Miss Carden with easy grace, and took no more notice of the other two, than if they were chairs and tables.

Mr. Frederick Coventry had studied the great art of pleasing, and had mastered it wonderfully; but he was not the man to waste it indiscriminately.

He was there to please a young lady, to whom he was attached, not to diffuse his sunshine indiscriminately.

He courted her openly, not indelicately, but with a happy air of respect and self-assurance.

Henry sat, sick with jealousy, and tried to work and watch; but he could only watch:  his hand trembled too much to work.

What may be called oblique flattery is very pleasing to those quick-witted girls, who have had a surfeit of direct compliments:  and it is oblique flattery, when a man is supercilious and distant to others, as well as tender and a little obsequious to her he would please.

Grace Carden enjoyed this oblique flattery of Mr. Coventry’s all the more that it came to her just at a moment when her companions seemed disposed to ignore her.  She rewarded Mr. Coventry accordingly, and made Henry Little’s heart die within him.  His agony became intolerable.  What a position was his!  Set there, with a chisel in his hand, to copy the woman he loved, while another wooed her before his face, and she smiled at his wooing!

At last his chisel fell out of his hand, and startled everybody:  and then he rose up with pale cheek, and glittering eyes, and Heaven only knows what he was going to do or say.  But at that moment another visitor was announced, to whom indeed the door was never closed.  He entered the next moment, and Grace ran to meet him, crying, “Oh, Mr. Raby! this is a surprise.”