Thus:—­he is a nice young fellow, well bred, no cringing courtier, accomplished, good at classics, fairish at mathematics, a scholar in French, German, Italian, with a shrewd knowledge of the different races, and with sound English sentiment too, and the capacity for writing good English, although in those views of his the ideas are unusual, therefore un-English, profoundly so.  But his intentions are patriotic; they would not displease Lord Ormont.  He has a worship of Lord Ormont.  All we can say on behalf of an untried inferior is in that,—­only the valiant admire devotedly.  Well, he can write grammatical, readable English.  What if Lord Ormont were to take him as a secretary while the Memoirs are in hand?  He might help to chasten the sentences laughed at by those newspapers.  Or he might, being a terrible critic of writing, and funny about styles, put it in an absurd light, that would cause the Memoirs to be tossed into the fire.  He was made for the post of secretary!  The young man’s good looks would be out of harm’s way then.  If any sprig of womankind come across him there, it will, at any rate, not be a girl.  Women must take care of themselves.  Only the fools among them run to mischief in the case of a handsome young fellow.

Supposing a certain woman to be one of the fools?  Lady Charlotte merely suggested it in the dashing current of her meditations—­did not strike it out interrogatively.  The woman would be a fine specimen among her class; that was all.  For the favourite of Lord Ormont to stoop from her place beside him—­ay, but women do; heroes have had the woeful experience of that fact.  First we see them aiming themselves at their hero; next they are shooting an eye at the handsome man.  The thirst of nature comes after that of their fancy, in conventional women.  Sick of the hero tried, tired of their place in the market, no longer ashamed to acknowledge it, they begin to consult their own taste for beauty—­they have it quite as much as the men have it; and when their worshipped figure of manliness, in a romantic sombrero, is a threadbare giant, showing bruises, they sink on their inherent desire for a dance with the handsome man.  And the really handsome man is the most extraordinary of the rarities.  No wonder that when he appears he slays them, walks over them like a pestilence!

This young Weyburn would touch the fancy of a woman of a romantic turn.  Supposing her enthusiastic in her worship of the hero, after a number of years—­for anything may be imagined where a woman is concerned—­why, another enthusiasm for the same object, and on the part of a stranger, a stranger with effective eyes, rapidly leads to sympathy.  Suppose the reverse—­the enthusiasm gone to dust, or become a wheezy old bellows, as it does where there’s disparity of age, or it frequently does—­then the sympathy with a good-looking stranger comes more rapidly still.