‘Oh, never mind how I do it,’ returned Harry, manfully.  ’How am I to do it, then?’ he added, suddenly remembering his debt to Evan.

Mrs. Shorne instructed him how to do it quietly, and without fear of scandal.  The miserable champion replied that it was very well for her to tell him to say this and that, but—­and she thought him demented—­he must, previous to addressing Harrington in those terms, have money.

‘Money!’ echoed the lady.  ‘Money!’

‘Yes, money!’ he iterated doggedly, and she learnt that he had borrowed a sum of Harrington, and the amount of the sum.

It was a disastrous plight, for Mrs. Shorne was penniless.

She cited Ferdinand Laxley as a likely lender.

‘Oh, I’m deep with him already,’ said Harry, in apparent dejection.

‘How dreadful are these everlasting borrowings of yours!’ exclaimed his aunt, unaware of a trifling incongruity in her sentiments.  ’You must speak to him without—­pay him by-and-by.  We must scrape the money together.  I will write to your grandfather.’

’Yes; speak to him!  How can I when I owe him?  I can’t tell a fellow he’s a blackguard when I owe him, and I can’t speak any other way.  I ain’t a diplomatist.  Dashed if I know what to do!’

‘Juliana,’ murmured his aunt.

‘Can’t ask her, you know.’

Mrs. Shorne combated the one prominent reason for the objection:  but there were two.  Harry believed that he had exhausted Juliana’s treasury.  Reproaching him further for his wastefulness, Mrs. Shorne promised him the money should be got, by hook or by crook, next day.

’And you will speak to this Mr. Harrington to-night, Harry?  No allusion to the loan till you return it.  Appeal to his sense of honour.’

The dinner-bell assembled the inmates of the house.  Evan was not among them.  He had gone, as the Countess said aloud, on a diplomatic mission to Fallow field, with Andrew Cogglesby.  The truth being that he had finally taken Andrew into his confidence concerning the letter, the annuity, and the bond.  Upon which occasion Andrew had burst into a laugh, and said he could lay his hand on the writer of the letter.

’Trust Old Tom for plots, Van!  He’ll blow you up in a twinkling, the cunning old dog!  He pretends to be hard—­he ’s as soft as I am, if it wasn’t for his crotchets.  We’ll hand him back the cash, and that’s ended.  And—­eh? what a dear girl she is!  Not that I’m astonished.  My Harry might have married a lord—­sit at top of any table in the land!  And you’re as good as any man.

That’s my opinion.  But I say she’s a wonderful girl to see it.’

Chattering thus, Andrew drove with the dear boy into Fallow field.  Evan was still in his dream.  To him the generous love and valiant openness of Rose, though they were matched in his own bosom, seemed scarcely human.  Almost as noble to him were the gentlemanly plainspeaking of Sir Franks and Lady Jocelyn’s kind commonsense.  But the more he esteemed them, the more unbounded and miraculous appeared the prospect of his calling their daughter by the sacred name, and kneeling with her at their feet.  Did the dear heavens have that in store for him?  The horizon edges were dimly lighted.