under other influences’?  Then, I copy your words, you say, ‘She is all things to everybody, and cannot help it.’  In that case, I would seize my opportunity and her waist, and tell her she was locked up from anybody else.  Friendship with men—­but I cannot understand friendship with women, and watching them to keep them right, which must mean that you do not think much of them.”

Mrs. Lovell, at this point, raised her eyes abruptly from the letter and returned it.

“You discuss me very freely with your friend,” she said.

Percy drooped to her.  “I warned you when you wished to read it.”

“But, you see, you have bewildered him.  It was scarcely wise to write other than plain facts.  Men of that class.”  She stopped.

“Of that class?” said he.

“Men of any class, then:  you yourself:  if any one wrote to you such things, what would you think?  It is very unfair.  I have the honour of seeing you daily, because you cannot trust me out of your sight?  What is there inexplicable about me?  Do you wonder that I talk openly of women who are betrayed, and do my best to help them?”.

“On the contrary; you command my esteem,” said Percy.

“But you think me a puppet?”

“Fond of them, perhaps?” his tone of voice queried in a manner that made her smile.

“I hate them,” she said, and her face expressed it.

“But you make them.”

“How?  You torment me.”

“How can I explain the magic?  Are you not making one of me now, where I stand?”

“Then, sit.”

“Or kneel?”

“Oh, Percy! do nothing ridiculous.”

Inveterate insight was a characteristic of Major Waring; but he was not the less in Mrs. Lovell’s net.  He knew it to be a charm that she exercised almost unknowingly.  She was simply a sweet instrument for those who could play on it, and therein lay her mighty fascination.  Robert’s blunt advice that he should seize the chance, take her and make her his own, was powerful with him.  He checked the particular appropriating action suggested by Robert.

“I owe you an explanation,” he said.  “Margaret, my friend.”

“You can think of me as a friend, Percy?”

“If I can call you my friend, what would I not call you besides?  I did you a great and shameful wrong when you were younger.  Hush! you did not deserve that.  Judge of yourself as you will; but I know now what my feelings were then.  The sublime executioner was no more than a spiteful man.  You give me your pardon, do you not?  Your hand?”

She had reached her hand to him, but withdrew it quickly.

“Not your hand, Margaret?  But, you must give it to some one.  You will be ruined, if you do not.”

She looked at him with full eyes.  “You know it then?” she said slowly; but the gaze diminished as he went on.

“I know, by what I know of you, that you of all women should owe a direct allegiance.  Come; I will assume privileges.  Are you free?”