“It is you who make it so, Ermine.”

“No; it is the providence that has set me aside from the active work of life.  Pray do not go on, Colin, it is only giving us both useless pain.  You do not know what it costs me to deny you, and I feel that I must.  I know you are only acting on the impulse of generosity.  Yes, I will say so, though you think it is to please yourself,” she added, with one of those smiles that nothing could drive far from her lips, and which made it infinitely harder to acquiesce in her denial.

“I will make you think so in time,” he said.  “Then I might tell you, you had no right to please yourself,” she answered, still with the same air of playfulness; “you have got a brother, you know—­and—­yes, I hear you growl; but if he is a poor old broken man out of health, it is the more reason you should not vex him, nor hamper yourself with a helpless commodity.”

“You are not taking the way to make me forget what my brother has done for us.”

“How do you know that he did not save me from being a strong-minded military lady!  After all, it was absurd to expect people to look favourably on our liking for one another, and you know they could not be expected to know that there was real stuff in the affair.  If there had not been, we should have thought so all the same, you know, and been quite as furious.”

He could not help smiling, recollecting fury that, in the course of these twelve years, he had seen evinced under similar circumstances by persons who had consoled themselves before he had done pitying them.  “Still,” he said gravely, “I think there was harshness.”

“So do I, but not so much as I thought at that time, and—­oh, surely that is not Rachel Curtis?  I told her I thought you would call.”

“Intolerable!” he muttered between his teeth.  “Is she always coming to bore you?”

“She has been very kind, and my great enlivenment,” said Ermine, “and she can’t be expected to know how little we want her.  Oh, there, the danger is averted!  She must have asked if you were here.”

“I was just thinking that she was the chief objection to Lady Temple’s kind wish of having you at Myrtlewood.”

“Does Lady Temple know?” asked Ermine, blushing.

“I could not keep it from one who has been so uniformly kind to me; but I desired her not to let it go further till I should hear your wishes.”

“Yes, she has a right to know,” said Ermine; “but please, not a word elsewhere.”

“And will you not come to stay with her?”

“I?  Oh, no; I am fit for no place but this.  You don’t half know how bad I am.  When you have seen a little more of us, you will be quite convinced.”

“Well, at least, you give me leave to come here.”

“Leave?  When it is a greater pleasure than I ever thought to have again; that is, while you understand that you said good-bye to the Ermine of Beauchamp Parsonage twelve years ago, and that the thing here is only a sort of ghost, most glad and grateful to be a friend—­ a sister.”