“Ah!”

“You see, my love?”

“Oh, I do see; yes.”

“I put forth no pretensions to perfection,” Sir Willoughby continued.  “I can bear a considerable amount of provocation; still I can be offended, and I am unforgiving when I have been offended.  Speak to Vernon, if a natural occasion should spring up.  I shall, of course, have to speak to him.  You may, Clara, have observed a man who passed me on the road as we were cantering home, without a hint of a touch to his hat.  That man is a tenant of mine, farming six hundred acres, Hoppner by name:  a man bound to remember that I have, independently of my position, obliged him frequently.  His lease of my ground has five years to run.  I must say I detest the churlishness of our country population, and where it comes across me I chastise it.  Vernon is a different matter:  he will only require to be spoken to.  One would fancy the old fellow laboured now and then under a magnetic attraction to beggary.  My love,” he bent to her and checked their pacing up and down, “you are tired?”

“I am very tired to-day,” said Clara.

His arm was offered.  She laid two fingers on it, and they dropped when he attempted to press them to his rib.

He did not insist.  To walk beside her was to share in the stateliness of her walking.

He placed himself at a corner of the door-way for her to pass him into the house, and doated on her cheek, her ear, and the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot—­curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps—­waved or fell, waved over or up or involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger than long round locks of gold to trick the heart.

Laetitia had nothing to show resembling such beauty.

CHAPTER X

IN WHICH SIR WILLOUGHBY CHANCES TO SUPPLY THE TITLE FOR HIMSELF

Now Vernon was useful to his cousin; he was the accomplished secretary of a man who governed his estate shrewdly and diligently, but had been once or twice unlucky in his judgements pronounced from the magisterial bench as a justice of the Peace, on which occasions a half column of trenchant English supported by an apposite classical quotation impressed Sir Willoughby with the value of such a secretary in a controversy.  He had no fear of that fiery dragon of scorching breath—­the newspaper press—­while Vernon was his right hand man; and as he intended to enter Parliament, he foresaw the greater need of him.  Furthermore, he liked his cousin to date his own controversial writings, on classical subjects, from Patterne Hall.  It caused his house to shine in a foreign field; proved the service of scholarship by giving it a flavour