This sweet lady departed, flinging down her firebrand on those hospitable boards.

Lucy, though she had defended her uncle, was not a little vexed that he had managed matters so as to get her talked of with Mr. Talboys.  Her natural modesty and reserve prevented her from remonstrating; nor was there any positive necessity.  She was one of those young ladies who seem born mistresses of the art of self-defense.  Deriving the art not from experience, but from instinct, they are as adroit at seventeen as they are at twenty-seven; so a last year’s bird constructs her first nest as cunningly as can a veteran feathered architect.

Therefore, without a grain of discourtesy or tangible ill-temper, she quietly froze, and a small family with her, they could not tell how or why, for they had never even suspected this girl’s power.  You would have seemed to them as one that mocketh had you told them they owed their gayety, their good-humor, their happiness, and their conversational powers to her.

Of these Talboys suffered the most.  She brought him to a stand-still by a very simple process.  She no longer patted or spurred him.  To vary the metaphor, a man that has no current must be stirred or stagnate; Lucy’s light hand stirred Talboys no more; Talboys stagnated.  Mr. Fountain suffered next in proportion.  He began to find that something was the matter, but what he had no idea.  He did not observe that, though Lucy answered him as kindly as ever, she did not draw him out as heretofore, far less that she was vexed with him, and on her guard against him and everybody, like a maitresse d’armes. No.  “The days were drawing in.  The air was heavy; no carbon in it.  Wind in the east again!!!” etc.  So subtle is the influence of these silly little creatures upon creation’s lords.

Mr. Talboys did not take delicate hints.  He continued his visits three times a week, and the coast was kept clear for him.  On this Miss Fountain proceeded to overt acts of war.  She brought a champion on the scene—­a terrible champion—­a champion so irresistible that I set any woman down as a coward who lets him loose upon a sex already so unequal to the contest as ours.  What that champion’s real name is I have in vain endeavored to discover, but he is called “Headache.”  When this terrible ally mingled in the game—­on the Talboys nights—­dismay fell upon the wretched males that abode in and visited the once cheerful, cozy Font Abbey.  Messrs. Fountain and Talboys put their heads together in grave, anxious consultations, and Arthur vented a yell of remonstrance.  He found the lady one afternoon preparing indisposition.  She was leaning languidly back, and the fire was dying out of her eye, and the color out of her cheek, and the blinds were drawn down.  The poor boy burst in upon this prologue.  “Oh, Lucy,” he cried, in piteous, foreboding tones, “don’t go and have a headache to-night.  It was so jolly till you took to these stupid headaches.”