said. "I have
scarcely had an opportunity to ask you whether you find the life here as
pleasant as you hoped, whether it has realized your expectations."

"Does anything ever do that?" she asked, a little flippantly. "It is
different, of course. I do not think that I should be willing to go back
to Blakely, at any rate."

"You have made a great many friends," he remarked. "I hear of you
continually."

"A host of acquaintances," she remarked. "I do not think that I have
materially increased the circle of my friends. I hear of you too, Sir
Leslie, very often. It seems that people give you a good deal of credit
for inducing my uncle to come back into politics."

"I certainly did my best to persuade him," Sir Leslie answered, smoothly.
"If I had known how much anxiety he was going to cause us I might perhaps
have been a little less keen."

"Anxiety!" she repeated.

"Yes! Do you know where he is now?"

"I have no idea," Clara answered. "All that I do know is that he has gone
away for three weeks, and that I am going to stay with the Duchess till
he comes back. It is very nice of her, and all that, of course, but I
feel rather as though I were going into prison. The Duchess isn't exactly
the modern sort of chaperon."

Borrowdean nodded sympathetically.

"And consider my anxiety," he remarked. "Your uncle has gone North to
consider the true position of the labouring classes. Now Mr. Mannering is
a brilliant politician and a sound thinker, but he is also a man of
sentiment. They will drug him with it up there. He will probably come
back with half a dozen new schemes, and we don't want them, you know. He
ought to be speaking at Glasgow and Leeds this week. He simply ignores
his responsibilities. He yields to a sudden whim and leaves us _plantes
la_."

She seemed scarcely to have heard the conclusion of his sentence. Her
attention was fixed upon a group of men who were talking near.

"Do you know--isn't that Major Bristow?" she asked Borrowdean, abruptly.

Borrowdean put up his glass.

"Looks like him," he admitted.

"I should be so much obliged," she said, "if you would tell him that
I wish to see him. I have a message for his sister," she concluded,
a little lamely.

Borrowdean did as he was asked. He noticed the slight impatience of the
man as he delivered his message, and the flush with which she greeted
him. Then, with a little shrug of the shoulders, he pursued his way.

CHAPTER VIII

A PAGE FRO