Vernon was enlightened before Willoughby had spoken.  His mouth shut rigidly, and there was a springing increase of the luminous wavering of his eyes.  Some star that Clara had watched at night was like them in the vivid wink and overflow of its light.  Yet, as he was perfectly sedate, none could have suspected his blood to be chasing wild with laughter, and his frame strung to the utmost to keep it from volleying.  So happy was she in his aspect, that her chief anxiety was to recover the name of the star whose shining beckons and speaks, and is in the quick of spirit-fire.  It is the sole star which on a night of frost and strong moonlight preserves an indomitable fervency:  that she remembered, and the picture of a hoar earth and a lean Orion in flooded heavens, and the star beneath Eastward of him:  but the name! the name!—­She heard Willoughby indistinctly.

“Oh, the old story; another effort; you know my wish; a failure, of course, and no thanks on either side, I suppose I must ask your excuse.—­They neither of them see what’s good for them, sir.”

“Manifestly, however,” said Dr. Middleton, “if one may opine from the division we have heard of, the father is disposed to back your nominee.”

“I can’t say; as far as I am concerned, I made a mess of it.”  Vernon withstood the incitement to acquiesce, but he sparkled with his recognition of the fact.

“You meant well, Willoughby.”

“I hope so, Vernon.”

“Only you have driven her away.”

“We must resign ourselves.”

“It won’t affect me, for I’m off to-morrow.”

“You see, sir, the thanks I get.”

“Mr. Whitford,” said Dr. Middleton, “You have a tower of strength in the lady’s father.”

“Would you have me bring it to bear upon the lady, sir?”

“Wherefore not?”

“To make her marriage a matter of obedience to her father?”

“Ay, my friend, a lusty lover would have her gladly on those terms, well knowing it to be for the lady’s good.  What do you say, Willoughby?”

“Sir!  Say?  What can I say?  Miss Dale has not plighted her faith.  Had she done so, she is a lady who would never dishonour it.”

“She is an ideal of constancy, who would keep to it though it had been broken on the other side,” said Vernon, and Clara thrilled.

“I take that, sir, to be a statue of constancy, modelled upon which a lady of our flesh may be proclaimed as graduating for the condition of idiocy,” said Dr. Middleton.

“But faith is faith, sir.”

“But the broken is the broken, sir, whether in porcelain or in human engagements; and all that one of the two continuing faithful, I should rather say, regretful, can do, is to devote the remainder of life to the picking up of the fragments; an occupation properly to be pursued, for the comfort of mankind, within the enclosure of an appointed asylum.”

“You destroy the poetry of sentiment, Dr. Middleton.”