iss Payne's only reply was a contemptuous upward toss of the head. "If
you will be at Euston Square on Saturday to meet the five-fifty train
from Monckton," she resumed, "I should be obliged to you--Miss Liddell
travels alone--and you can dine with us if you like after, unless you
are going to preach the gospel somewhere."

"Thank you. Why do you object to my preaching?"

"Because I like things done decently and in order. You are not ordained,
and there are plenty of churches and chapels, God knows, for people to
go to, if they would wash their faces and be decent. Now I can't stay
here any longer, so good-by for the present." She took up a little
basket containing an old pair of gloves, large scissors, and a ball of
twine, and walked briskly away to attend to the plants in her diminutive
conservatory.

De Burgh did not prolong his absence; he returned to Castleford while
Katherine was still in attendance on the little invalid; but he found
his stay neither pleasant nor profitable. Katherine was far too much
occupied nursing her nephew to give any time or attention to her
impatient admirer.

"Miss Liddell is a peculiar specimen of her sex," he growled, in his
usual candid and unaffected manner, as he and Colonel Ormonde sat alone
over their wine. "She never leaves those brats. She must know that it's
not every girl _I_ should take the trouble of teaching, and yet she
throws over each appointment I make. Does she intend to adopt your
wife's boys? Adopted sons are an appendage no man would like to accept
with a bride, be she ever so well endowed."

"Oh, she will forget them as soon as she falls in love! You must carry
on the siege more vigorously."

"How the deuce are you to do it when you never get within hail of the
fortress? There is something peculiar about Katherine Liddell I can't
quite make out. If she were a commonplace woman, angular, squinting, or
generally plain, I could go in and win and collar the cash without
hesitation, but somehow or other I can't go into the affair in this
spirit. I want the woman as well as the money."

"Well, I see no reason why you shouldn't have both. Your faintness of
heart never lost _you_ any fair lady, I am sure, Jack."

"Perhaps not." And he smoked meditatively for a minute or two.

"Then you will not leave us to-morrow?" said Ormonde.

"When does _she_ go up to town?" asked De Burgh.

"On Monday, I believe."

"Then I'll run up the day after to-morrow. Old De Burgh