“And did you encounter the knight of your dream?”

“Not then.”  She lowered her eyelids.  It was prettily done.

“And how did you bear the disappointment?”

“My dream was in the nursery.  The day my frock was lengthened to a gown I stood at the altar.  I am not the only girl that has been made a woman in a day, and given to an ogre instead of a true knight.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Sir Austin, “women have much to bear.”

Here the couple changed characters.  The lady became gay as the baronet grew earnest.

“You know it is our lot,” she said.  “And we are allowed many amusements.  If we fulfil our duty in producing children, that, like our virtue, is its own reward.  Then, as a widow, I have wonderful privileges.”

“To preserve which, you remain a widow?”

“Certainly,” she responded.  “I have no trouble now in patching and piecing that rag the world calls—­a character.  I can sit at your feet every day unquestioned.  To be sure, others do the same, but they are female eccentrics, and have cast off the rag altogether.”

Sir Austin drew nearer to her.  “You would have made an admirable mother, madam.”

This from Sir Austin was very like positive wooing.

“It is,” he continued, “ten thousand pities that you are not one.”

“Do you think so?” She spoke with humility.

“I would,” he went on, “that heaven had given you a daughter.”

“Would you have thought her worthy of Richard?”

“Our blood, madam, should have been one!”

The lady tapped her toe with her parasol.  “But I am a mother,” she said.  “Richard is my son.  Yes!  Richard is my boy,” she reiterated.

Sir Austin most graciously appended, “Call him ours, madam,” and held his head as if to catch the word from her lips, which, however, she chose to refuse, or defer.  They made the coloured West a common point for their eyes, and then Sir Austin said: 

“As you will not say ‘ours,’ let me.  And, as you have therefore an equal claim on the boy, I will confide to you a project I have lately conceived.”

The announcement of a project hardly savoured of a coming proposal, but for Sir Austin to confide one to a woman was almost tantamount to a declaration.  So Lady Blandish thought, and so said her soft, deep-eyed smile, as she perused the ground while listening to the project.  It concerned Richard’s nuptials.  He was now nearly eighteen.  He was to marry when he was five-and-twenty.  Meantime a young lady, some years his junior, was to be sought for in the homes of England, who would be every way fitted by education, instincts, and blood—­on each of which qualifications Sir Austin unreservedly enlarged—­to espouse so perfect a youth and accept the honourable duty of assisting in the perpetuation of the Feverels.  The baronet went on to say that he proposed to set forth immediately, and devote a couple of months, to the first essay in his Coelebite search.