‘Well,’ said he, ‘we must consider them united; they are one.’

Duchess Susan replied, ’That’s what I tell him; she will do anything you wish.’

He repeated these words with an interjection, and decided in his mind that they were merely silly.  She was a real shepherdess by birth and nature, requiring a strong guard over her attractions on account of her simplicity; such was his reading of the problem; he had conceived it at the first sight of her, and always recurred to it under the influence of her artless eyes, though his theories upon men and women were astute, and that cavalier perceived by long-sighted Chloe at Duchess Susan’s coach window perturbed him at whiles.  Habitually to be anticipating the simpleton in a particular person is the sure way of being sometimes the dupe, as he would not have been the last to warn a neophyte; but abstract wisdom is in need of an unappeased suspicion of much keenness of edge, if we would have it alive to cope with artless eyes and our prepossessed fancy of their artlessness.

‘You talk of Chloe to him?’ he said.

She answered.  ’Yes, that I do.  And he does love her!  I like to hear him.  He is one of the gentlemen who don’t make me feel timid with them.’

She received a short lecture on the virtues of timidity in preserving the sex from danger; after which, considering that the lady who does not feel timid with a particular cavalier has had no sentiment awakened, he relinquished his place to Mr. Camwell, and proceeded to administer the probe to Caseldy.

That gentleman was communicatively candid.  Chloe had left him, and he related how, summoned home to England and compelled to settle a dispute threatening a lawsuit, he had regretfully to abstain from visiting the Wells for a season, not because of any fear of the attractions of play—­ he had subdued the frailty of the desire to play—­but because he deemed it due to his Chloe to bring her an untroubled face, and he wished first to be the better of the serious annoyances besetting him.  For some similar reason he had not written; he wished to feast on her surprise.  ‘And I had my reward,’ he said, as if he had been the person principally to suffer through that abstinence.  ’I found—­I may say it to you, Mr. Beamish love in her eyes.  Divine by nature, she is one of the immortals, both in appearance and in steadfastness.’

They referred to Duchess Susan.  Caseldy reluctantly owned that it would be an unkindness to remove Chloe from attendance on her during the short remaining term of her stay at the Wells; and so he had not proposed it, he said, for the duchess was a child, an innocent, not stupid by any means; but, of course, her transplanting from an inferior to an exalted position put her under disadvantages.

Mr. Beamish spoke of the difficulties of his post as guardian, and also of the strange cavalier seen at her carriage window by Chloe.

Caseldy smiled and said, ’If there was one—­and Chloe is rather long—­ sighted—­we can hardly expect her to confess it.’