“Will you one day?—­and not think me a perpetual tumbler!  You have heard of melancholy clowns.  You will find the face not so laughable behind my paint.  When I was thirteen years younger I was loved, and my dearest sank to the grave.  Since then I have not been quite at home in life; probably because of finding no one so charitable as she.  ’Tis easy to win smiles and hands, but not so easy to win a woman whose faith you would trust as your own heart before the enemy.  I was poor then.  She said.  ‘The day after my twenty-first birthday’; and that day I went for her, and I wondered they did not refuse me at the door.  I was shown upstairs, and I saw her, and saw death.  She wished to marry me, to leave me her fortune!”

“Then, never marry,” said Clara, in an underbreath.

She glanced behind.

Sir Willoughby was close, walking on turf.

“I must be cunning to escape him after breakfast,” she thought.

He had discarded his foolishness of the previous days, and the thought in him could have replied:  “I am a dolt if I let you out of my sight.”

Vernon appeared, formal as usual of late.  Clara begged his excuse for withdrawing Crossjay from his morning swim.  He nodded.

De Craye called to Willoughby for a book of the trains.

“There’s a card in the smoking-room; eleven, one, and four are the hours, if you must go,” said Willoughby.

“You leave the Hall, Colonel De Craye?”

“In two or three days, Miss Middleton.”

She did not request him to stay:  his announcement produced no effect on her.  Consequently, thought he—­well, what? nothing:  well, then, that she might not be minded to stay herself.  Otherwise she would have regretted the loss of an amusing companion:  that is the modest way of putting it.  There is a modest and a vain for the same sentiment; and both may be simultaneously in the same breast; and each one as honest as the other; so shy is man’s vanity in the presence of here and there a lady.  She liked him:  she did not care a pin for him—­how could she? yet she liked him:  O, to be able to do her some kindling bit of service!  These were his consecutive fancies, resolving naturally to the exclamation, and built on the conviction that she did not love Willoughby, and waited for a spirited lift from circumstances.  His call for a book of the trains had been a sheer piece of impromptu, in the mind as well as on the mouth.  It sprang, unknown to him, of conjectures he had indulged yesterday and the day before.  This morning she would have an answer to her letter to her friend, Miss Lucy Darleton, the pretty dark girl, whom De Craye was astonished not to have noticed more when he danced with her.  She, pretty as she was, had come to his recollection through the name and rank of her father, a famous general of cavalry, and tactician in that arm.  The colonel despised himself for not having been devoted to Clara Middleton’s friend.