At first, the gentlemen only appeared in a black herd at the door, where Mr. Calcott had stopped Lord Ormersfield short, in his eagerness to impress on him the views of the county on a police-bill in course of preparation for the next session.  The other magistrates congregated round; but James Frost and Sydney Calcott had slipped past, to the piano where Lady Conway had sent Miss Calcott and Isabel.  ‘Why did not Fitzjocelyn, come too?’ was murmured by the young group in the recess opposite the door; and when at last he became visible, leaning against the wall, listening to the Squire, Virginia declared he was going to serve them just as he used at Beauchastel.

‘Oh, no! he shan’t—­I’ll rescue him!’ exclaimed Clara; and leaping up to her cameleopard attitude, she sprang forward, and, with a voice audible in an unlucky lull of the music, she exclaimed, ’Louis!  Louis! don’t you see that I am here?’

As he turned, with a look of surprise and almost rebuke, her own words came back to her ears as they must have sounded to others; her face became poppy-coloured, nothing light but her flaxen eyebrows; and she scarcely gave her hand to be shaken.  ’No, I did not know you were coming,’ he said; and almost partaking her confusion, as he felt all eyes upon her, he looked in vain for a refuge for her.

How welcome was Mary’s kind face and quiet gesture, covering poor Clara’s retreat as she sank into a dark nook, sheltered by the old black cabinet!  Louis thanked Mary by a look, as much as to say, ‘Just like you,’ and was glad to perceive that James had not been present.  He had gone to ask Miss Faithfull to supply the missing stanzas of a Jacobite song, and just then returned, saying that she knew them, but could not remember them.

Fitzjocelyn, however, capped the fragment, and illustrated it with some anecdotes that interested Miss Conway.  James had great hopes that she was going to see him to the best advantage, but still there was a great drawback in the presence of Sydney Calcott.  Idolized at home, successful abroad, young Calcott had enough of the prig to be a perpetual irritation to Jem Frost, all the more because he could never make Louis resent, nor accept, as other than natural, the goodnatured supercilious patronage of the steady distinguished senior towards the idle junior.

Jacobite legends and Stuart relics would have made Miss Conway oblivious of everything else; but Sydney Calcott must needs divert the conversation from that channel by saying, ’Ah! there Fitzjocelyn is in his element.  He is a perfect handbook to the byways of history.’

‘For the diffusion of useless knowledge?’ said Louis.

’Illustrated by the examination, when the only fact you could adduce about the Argonauts was that Charles V. founded the order of the Golden Fleece.’

’I beg your pardon; it was his great-grandfather.  I had read my Quentin Durward too well for that.’