Young Sir Willoughby spoke a word of the rejected visitor to Miss Durham, in response to her startled look:  “I shall drop him a cheque,” he said, for she seemed personally wounded, and had a face of crimson.

The young lady did not reply.

Dating from the humble departure of Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne up the limes-avenue under a gathering rain-cloud, the ring of imps in attendance on Sir Willoughby maintained their station with strict observation of his movements at all hours; and were comparisons in quest, the sympathetic eagerness of the eyes of caged monkeys for the hand about to feed them, would supply one.  They perceived in him a fresh development and very subtle manifestation of the very old thing from which he had sprung.

CHAPTER II

THE YOUNG SIR WILLOUGHBY

These little scoundrel imps, who have attained to some respectability as the dogs and pets of the Comic Spirit, had been curiously attentive three years earlier, long before the public announcement of his engagement to the beautiful Miss Durham, on the day of Sir Willoughby’s majority, when Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson said her word of him.  Mrs. Mountstuart was a lady certain to say the remembered, if not the right, thing.  Again and again was it confirmed on days of high celebration, days of birth or bridal, how sure she was to hit the mark that rang the bell; and away her word went over the county:  and had she been an uncharitable woman she could have ruled the county with an iron rod of caricature, so sharp was her touch.  A grain of malice would have sent county faces and characters awry into the currency.  She was wealthy and kindly, and resembled our mother Nature in her reasonable antipathies to one or two things which none can defend, and her decided preference of persons that shone in the sun.  Her word sprang out of her.  She looked at you, and forth it came:  and it stuck to you, as nothing laboured or literary could have adhered.  Her saying of Laetitia Dale:  “Here she comes with a romantic tale on her eyelashes,” was a portrait of Laetitia.  And that of Vernon Whitford:  “He is a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar,” painted the sunken brilliancy of the lean long-walker and scholar at a stroke.

Of the young Sir Willoughby, her word was brief; and there was the merit of it on a day when he was hearing from sunrise to the setting of the moon salutes in his honour, songs of praise and Ciceronian eulogy.  Rich, handsome, courteous, generous, lord of the Hall, the feast and the dance, he excited his guests of both sexes to a holiday of flattery.  And, says Mrs. Mountstuart, while grand phrases were mouthing round about him, “You see he has a leg.”