’I asked her to try me, but they would make no conditions.  I am sorry this could not be, since you wished it.’

’If you are not sorry on your own account, there are no regrets to be wasted on mine.’

‘Candidly, father,’ said Louis, ’much as I like her, I cannot be sorry to keep my youth and liberty a little longer.’

‘Then you should never have entered on the subject at all,’ said Lord Ormersfield, beginning to write a letter; and poor Louis, in his praiseworthy effort not to be reserved with him, found he had been confessing that he had not only been again making a fool of himself, but, what was less frequent and less pardonable, of his father likewise.  He limped out at the window, and was presently found by his great-aunt, reading what he called a raving novel, to see how he ought to have done it.  She shook her head at him, and told him that he was not even decently concerned.

‘Indeed I am,’ he replied.  ’I wished my father to have had some peace of mind about me, and it does not flatter one’s vanity.’

Dear, soft-hearted Aunt Kitty, with all her stores of comfort ready prepared, and unable to forgive, or even credit, the rejection of her Louis, without a prior attachment, gave a hint that this might be his consolation.  He caught eagerly at the idea.  ’I had never once thought of that!  It can’t be any Spaniard out in Peru—­she has too much sense.  What are you looking so funny about?  What! is it nearer home?  That’s it, then!  Famous!  It would be a capital arrangement, if that terrible old father is conformable.  What an escape I have had of him!  I am sure it is a most natural and proper preference—­’

’Stop! stop, Louis, you are going too fast.  I know nothing.  Don’t say a word to Jem, on any account:  indeed, you must not.  It is all going on very well now; but the least notion that he was observed, or that it was his Uncle Oliver’s particular wish, and there would be an end of it.’

She was just wise enough to keep back the wishes of the other vizier, but she had said enough to set Louis quite at his ease, and put him in the highest spirits.  He seemed to have taken out a new lease of boyishness, and, though constrained before Mary, laughed, talked, and played pranks, so as unconsciously to fret his father exceedingly.

Clara’s alert wits perceived that so many private interviews had some signification; and Mrs. Frost found her talking it over with her brother, and conjecturing so much, that granny thought it best to supply the key, thinking, perhaps, that a little jealousy would do Jem no harm.  But the effect on him was to produce a fit of hearty laughter, as he remembered poor Lord Ormersfield’s unaccountable urbanity and suppressed exultation in the morning’s ride.  ’I honour the Ponsonbys,’ he said, ’for not choosing to second his lordship’s endeavours to tyrannize over that poor fellow, body and soul.  Poor Louis! he is fabulously dutiful.’