come to some resolution.  With such thoughts as these crossing his mind he certainly was not going to proclaim his engagement to Lady Penwether.  But Lady Penwether was a determined woman.  Her smile, when she condescended to smile, was very sweet,—­ lighting up her whole face and flattering for the moment the person on whom it shone.  It was as though a rose in emitting its perfume could confine itself to the nostrils of its one favoured friend.  And now she smiled on Morton as she asked another question.  “I did hear,” she said, “from one of your Foreign Office young men that you and Miss Trefoil were very intimate.”

“Who was that, Lady Penwether?”

“Of course I shall mention no name.  You might call out the poor lad and shoot him, or, worse still, have him put down to the bottom of his class.  But I did hear it.  And then, when I find her staying with her mother at your house, of course I believe it to be true.”

“Now she is staying at your brother’s house,—­which is much the same thing.”

“But I am here.”

“And my grandmother is at Bragton.”

“That puts me in mind, Mr. Morton.  I am so sorry that we did not know it, so that we might have asked her.”

“She never goes out anywhere, Lady Penwether.”

“And there is nothing then in the report that I heard?”

Morton paused a moment before he answered, and during that moment collected his diplomatic resources.  He was not a weak man, who could be made to tell anything by the wiles of a pretty woman.  “I think,” he said, “that when people have anything of that kind which they wish to be known, they declare it.”

“I beg your pardon.  I did not mean to unravel a secret.”

“There are secrets, Lady Penwether, which people do like to unravel, but which the owners of them sometimes won’t abandon.”  Then there was nothing more said on the subject.  Lady Penwether did not smile again, and left him to go about the room on her business as hostess, as soon as the dance was over.  But she was sure that they were engaged.

In the meantime, the conversation between Lord Rufford and Arabella was very different in its tone, though on the same subject.  He was certainly very much struck with her, not probably ever waiting to declare to himself that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life, but still feeling towards her an attraction which for the time was strong.  A very clever girl would frighten him; a very horsey girl would disgust him; a very quiet girl would bore him; or a very noisy girl annoy him.  With a shy girl he could never be at his ease, not enjoying the labour of overcoming such a barrier; and yet he liked to be able to feel that any female intimacy which he admitted was due to his own choice and not to that of the young woman.  Arabella Trefoil was not very clever, but she had given all her mind to this peculiar phase of life, and, to use a common phrase, knew what