’Very well.  I trust he will not think it needful still to be self-denying.’

‘It is not our part to press advances which are repelled,’ said Sophy.

‘Indeed, Sophy,’ said her father, smiling, ’I see nothing attractive in the attitude of rocks rent asunder.’

The undesigned allusion must have gone deep, for she coloured to a purple crimson, and said in a freezing tone, ’I thought you considered that to take him up again would be a direct insult to Lucy and her husband.’

‘They do not show much consideration for us,’ said Mr. Kendal.  ’How long ago was the date of her last letter?’

‘Nearly three weeks,’ said Albinia.  ’Poor child, how could she write with the catalogue raisonnee of the Louvre to learn by heart?’

The Dusautoys yearly gave a Christmas tea-party to the teachers in the Sunday-school, who had of late become more numerous, as Mr. Dusautoy’s influence had had more time to tell.  Mrs. Kendal was reckoned on as one of the chief supporters of the gaiety of the evening, but on this occasion she was forced to send Sophia alone.

Sophy regarded it as a duty and a penance, and submitted the more readily because it was so distasteful.  It was, however, more than she had reckoned on to find that the party had been extended to the male teachers, an exceedingly good and lugubrious-looking youth lately apprenticed to Mr. Bowles, and Ulick O’More.  It was the first time she had met the latter since his offence.  She avoided seeing him as long as possible, though all his movements seemed to thrill her, and so confused the conversation which she was trying to keep up, that she found herself saying that Genevieve Durant had lost an arm, and that Gilbert would spend Christmas in London.

She felt him coming nearer; she knew he was passing the Miss Northover in the purple silk and red neck-ribbon; she heard him exchanging a few civil words with the sister with the hair strained off her face; she knew he was coming; she grew more eager in her fears for Mr. Rainsforth’s chest.

Tea was announced.  Sophy held back in the general move, Ulick made a step nearer, their eyes met, and if ever eyes spoke, hers ordered him to keep his distance, while he glanced affront for affront, bowed and stepped back.

Sophy sat by Miss Jane Northover, and endeavoured to make her talk.  Anything would have been better than the echoes of the sprightliness at the lower end of the table, where Ulick was talking what he would have called blarney to Miss Susan Northover and Miss Mary Anne Higgins, both at once, till he excited them into a perpetual giggle.  Mr. Dusautoy was delighted, and evidently thought this brilliant success; Mrs. Dusautoy was less at her ease—­the mirth was less sober and more exclusive than she had intended; and Sophy, finding nothing could be made of Miss Jane, turned round to her other neighbour, Mr. Hope, and asked his opinion of the Whewell and Brewster controversy on the Plurality of Worlds.