‘I always think in these cases that the women must be the fools,’ she said.  Her affectation was to assume a knowledge of the world and all things in it.  We rode over to Julia’s cottage, on the outskirts of the estate now devolved upon her husband.  Irish eyes are certainly bewitching lights.  I thought, for my part, I could not do as the captain was doing, serving his country in foreign parts, while such as these were shining without a captain at home.  Janet approved his conduct, and was right.  ’What can a wife think the man worth who sits down to guard his house-door?’ she answered my slight innuendo.  She compared the man to a kennel-dog.  ‘This,’ said I, ‘comes of made-up matches,’ whereat she was silent.

Julia took her own view of her position.  She asked me whether it was not dismal for one who was called a grass widow, and was in reality a salt-water one, to keep fresh, with a lapdog, a cook, and a maid-servant, and a postman that passed the gate twenty times for twice that he opened it, and nothing to look for but this disappointing creature day after day!  At first she was shy, stole out a coy line of fingers to be shaken, and lisped; and out of that mood came right-about-face, with an exclamation of regret that she supposed she must not kiss me now.  I projected, she drew back.  ‘Shall Janet go?’ said I.  ’Then if nobody’s present I ’ll be talked of,’ said she, moaning queerly.  The tendency of her hair to creep loose of its bands gave her handsome face an aspect deliriously wild.  I complimented her on her keeping so fresh, in spite of her salt-water widowhood.  She turned the tables on me for looking so powerful, though I was dying for a foreign princess.

‘Oh! but that’ll blow over,’ she said; ’anything blows over as long as you don’t go up to the altar’; and she eyed her ringed finger, woebegone, and flashed the pleasantest of smiles with the name of her William.  Heriot, whom she always called Walter Heriot, was, she informed me, staying at Durstan Hall, the new great house, built on a plot of ground that the Lancashire millionaire had caught up, while the squire and the other landowners of the neighbourhood were sleeping.  ’And if you get Walter Heriot to come to you, Harry Richmond, it’ll be better for him, I’m sure,’ she added, and naively: 

’I ‘d like to meet him up at the Grange.’  Temple, she said, had left the Navy and was reading in London for the Bar—­good news to me.

‘You have not told us anything about your princess, Harry,’ Janet observed on the ride home.

‘Do you take her for a real person, Janet?’

‘One thinks of her as a snow-mountain you’ve been admiring.’

‘Very well; so let her be.’

‘Is she kind and good?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does she ride well?’

‘She rides remarkably well.’

’She ‘s fair, I suppose?’

’Janet, if I saw you married to Temple, it would be the second great wish of my heart.’