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.’

‘Harry, you’re a bit too cruel, as Julia would say.’

‘Have you noticed she gets more and more Irish?’

’Perhaps she finds it is liked.  Some women can adapt themselves . . . they ’re the happiest.  All I meant to ask you is, whether your princess is like the rest of us?’

‘Not at all,’ said I, unconscious of hurting.

’Never mind.  Don’t be hard on Julia.  She has the making of a good woman—­a girl can see that; only she can’t bear loneliness, and doesn’t understand yet what it is to be loved by a true gentleman.  Persons of that class can’t learn it all at once.’

I was pained to see her in tears.  Her figure was straight, and she spoke without a quaver of her voice.

‘Heriot’s an excellent fellow,’ I remarked.

‘He is.  I can’t think ill of my friends,’ said she.

‘Dear girl, is it these two who make you unhappy?’

‘No; but dear old grandada! . . .’

The course of her mind was obvious.  I would rather have had her less abrupt and more personal in revealing it.  I stammered something.