“I have heard it for the last month,” said Pratt, “and it has been spoken of as a thing certain; and it is true; is it not?”

“I believe it is,” said Crosbie, slowly.

“Why, what on earth is the matter with you, that you speak of it in that way?  Am I to congratulate you, or am I not?  The lady, I’m told, is a cousin of Dale’s.”

Crosbie had turned his chair from the table round to the fire, and said nothing in answer to this.  He sat with his glass of sherry in his hand, looking at the coals, and thinking whether it would not be well that he should tell the whole story to Pratt.  No one could give him better advice; and no one, as far as he knew his friend, would be less shocked at the telling of such a story.  Pratt had no romance about women, and had never pretended to very high sentiments.

“Come up into the smoking-room and I’ll tell you all about it,” said Crosbie.  So they went off together, and, as the smoking-room was untenanted, Crosbie was able to tell his story.

He found it very hard to tell;—­much harder than he had beforehand fancied.  “I have got into terrible trouble,” he began by saying.  Then he told how he had fallen suddenly in love with Lily, how, he had been rash and imprudent, how nice she was—­“infinitely too good for such a man as I am,” he said;—­how she had accepted him, and then how he had repented.  “I should have told you beforehand,” he then said, “that I was already half engaged to Lady Alexandrina de Courcy.”  The reader, however, will understand that this half engagement was a fiction.

“And now you mean that you are altogether engaged to her?”

“Exactly so.”

“And that Miss Dale must be told that, on second thoughts, you have changed your mind?”

“I know that I have behaved very badly,” said Crosbie.

“Indeed you have,” said his friend.

“It is one of those troubles in which a man finds himself involved almost before he knows where he is.”

“Well; I can’t look at it exactly in that light.  A man may amuse himself with a girl, and I can understand his disappointing her and not offering to marry her,—­though even that sort of thing isn’t much to my taste.  But, by George, to make an offer of marriage to such a girl as that in September, to live for a month in her family as her affianced husband, and then coolly go away to another house in October, and make an offer to another girl of higher rank—­”

“You know very well that that has had nothing to do with it.”

“It looks very like it.  And how are you going to communicate these tidings to Miss Dale?”

“I don’t know,” said Crosbie, who was beginning to be very sore.

“And you have quite made up your mind that you’ll stick to the earl’s daughter?”

The idea of jilting Alexandrina instead of Lily had never as yet presented itself to Crosbie, and now, as he thought of it, he could not perceive that it was feasible.