At dinner he was separated from her, and so hotly and skillfully engaged by Mrs. Bazalgette that he had scarcely time to look at his idol.  After dinner he had to contest her with Mr. Talboys and Mr. Hardie, the latter of whom he found a very able and sturdy antagonist.  Mr. Hardie had also many advantages over him.  First, the young lady was not the least shy of Mr. Hardie, but the parting scene beyond Royston had put her on her guard against David, and her instinct of defense made her reserved with him.  Secondly, Mrs. Bazalgette was perpetually making diversions, whose double object was to get David to herself and leave Lucy to Mr. Hardie.

With all this David found, to his sorrow, that, though he now lived under the same roof with her, he was not so near her as at Font Abbey.  There was a wall of etiquette and of rivals, and, as he now began to fear, of her own dislike between them.  To read through that mighty transparent jewel, a female heart, Nauta had recourse—­to what, do you think?  To arithmetic.  He set to work to count how many times she spoke to each of the party in the drawing-room, and he found that Mr. Hardie was at the head of the list, and he was at the bottom.  That might be an accident; perhaps this was his black evening; so he counted her speeches the next evening.  The result was the same.  Droll statistics, but sad and convincing to the simple David.  His spirits failed him; his aching heart turned cold.  He withdrew from the gay circle, and sat sadly with a book of prints before him, and turned the leaves listlessly.  In a pause of the conversation a sigh was heard in the corner.  They all looked round, and saw David all by himself, turning over the leaves, but evidently not inspecting them.

A sort of flash of satirical curiosity went from eye to eye.

But tact abounded at one end of the room, if there was a dearth of it at the other.

La rusee sans le savoir made a sign to them all to take no notice; at the same time she whispered:  “Going to sea in a few days for two years; the thought will return now and then.”  Having said this with a look at her aunt, that, Heaven knows how, gave the others the notion that it was to Mrs. Bazalgette she owed the solution of David’s fit of sadness, she glided easily into indifferent topics.  So then the others had a momentary feeling of pity for David.  Miss Lucy noticed this out of the tail of her eye.

That night David went to bed thoroughly wretched.  He could not sleep, so he got up and paced the deck of his room with a heavy heart.  At last, in his despair, he said, “I’ll fire signals of distress.”  So he sat down and took a sheet of paper, and fired:  “Nothing has turned as I expected.  She treats me like a stranger.  I seem to drop astern instead of making any way.  Here are three of us, I do believe, and all seem preferred to your poor brother; and, indeed, the only thing that gives me any hope is that she seems too kind to be