consent;—–­and Mabel could not have it without that other consent.  ’If you want to marry an English Duke,’ she once said to Isabel in that anger which she was unable to restrain, ’there is the Duke himself.  I never saw a man so absolutely in love.’  ’But I do not want to marry an English Duke,’ said Isabel, ’and I pity any girl who has any idea of marriage except that which comes from a wish to give back love for love.’

Through it all the father never suspected the real state of his son’s mind.  He was too simple to think it possible that the purpose which Silverbridge had declared to him as they walked together from the Beargarden had already been thrown to the winds.  He did not like to ask why the thing was not settled.  Young men, he thought, were sometimes shy, and young ladies not always ready to give immediate encouragement.  But when he saw them together he concluded that matters were going in the right direction.  It was, however, an opinion which he had all to himself.

During the next three or four days which followed the scene in the billiard-room Isabel kept herself out of her lover’s way.  She had explained to him that which she wished him to do, and she left him to do it.  Day by day she watched the circumstances of the life around her, and knew that it had not been done.  She was sure that it could not have been done while the Duke was explaining to her the beauty of quints, and expiating on the horrors of twelve pennies, and twelve inches, and twelve ounces,—­variegated in some matters by sixteen and fourteen!  He could not know that she was ambitious of becoming his daughter-in-law, while he was opening out to her the mysteries of the House of Lords, and explaining how it came to pass that while he was a member of one House of Parliament, his son should be sitting as a member of another;—­how it was that a nobleman could be a commoner, and how a peer of one part of the Empire could sit as the representative of a borough in another part.  She was an apt scholar.  Had there been a question of any other young man marrying her, he would probably have thought that no other young man could have done better.

Silverbridge was discontented with himself.  The greater misfortune was that Lady Mabel should be there.  While she was present to his father’s eyes he did not know how to declare his altered wishes.  Every now and then she would say to him some little word indicating her feelings of the absurdity of his passion.  ’I declare I don’t know whether it is you or your father that Miss Boncassen most affects,’ she said.  But to this and to other similar speeches he would make no answer.  She had extracted his secret from him at Killancodlem, and might use it against him if she pleased.  In his present frame of mind he was not disposed to joke with her on the subject.