He looked at Francie.  Her head drooped, but she had not taken her hand away, and the look on her face was not all embarrassment, but there was a rosy sunrise dawning on it.

All Clement could say was something of “Your father.”

“He knows, he understands; I saw it in his eyes,” said Ivinghoe.

To Clement the surprise was far greater than it would have been to his sister, and the experience was almost new to him, but he could read Francie’s face well enough to say—-

“My dear, I think we had better let you run in and compose yourself, or go to your aunt, while I talk to Lord Ivinghoe.”

Trembling, frightened, Francie was really glad to be released, as her lover with one pressure said—-

“I shall see you again, sweetest.”

She darted away, and Clement signed to Ivinghoe to sit down with him on the bench under the tree.

“I should like this better if you had brought your father’s full assent,” he said.

“There was no time.  I only read his face; he will come to-morrow.”

“No time?”

“Yes, to catch the train.  I hurried away the moment I learnt that—- that her affections were not otherwise engaged.  I never saw any one like her.  She has haunted me ever since those days at Rockquay; but-—but I was told that she cared for your nephew, and I could not take advantage of him in his absence.  And now I have but three days more.”

“Whoever told you was under a great error,” said Clement gravely, “and you have shown very generous self-command; but the advantages of this affair are so much the greatest on one side, that you cannot wonder if there is hesitation on our part, till we explicitly know that our poor little girl would not be unwelcome to your parents.”

“I know that no one can compare with her for—-for everything and anything,” stammered Ivinghoe, breaking from his mother’s language into his father’s, “and my father admires her as much as I do—- almost.”

“But what will he and your mother say to her being absolutely penniless?”

“Pish!”

“And worse-—child to a spendthrift, a man of no connection, except on his mother’s side.”

“She is your niece, your family have bred her up, made her so much more than exquisitely lovely.”

“She is a good little girl,” said Clement, “but what are we?  No, Ivinghoe, I do not blame you for speaking out, and she will be the happier for the knowledge of your affection, but it will not be right of us to give free consent, without being fully assured of that of Lord and Lady Rotherwood.”

Ivinghoe could only protest, but Clement rose to walk to the house, where his sister was sitting under the pergola in the agitation of answering Gerald’s letter, and had only seen Francie flit by, calling to her sister in a voice that now struck her as having been strange and suppressed.

Clement trusted a good deal to his sister’s quicker perceptions and habit of observation to guide his opinion in the affair that had burst on him, and was relieved that when Ivinghoe, like the well-bred young man that he was, went up to her, and taking her hand said, “I have been venturing to put my fate into the hands of your niece,” she did not seem astonished or overwhelmed, but said—-