en thus to the point, when they had never previously dealt in
anything save sentimental implications? The folly was in his speaking at
all. The game was now in Lady Charlotte's hands.

Adela, in another part of the field, had released herself by a consummate
use of the same weapon Wilfrid had so clumsily handled. Her object was to
put an end to the absurd and compromising sighs of Edward Buxley; and she
did so with the amiable contempt of a pupil dismissing a first instructor
in an art "We saw from the beginning it could not be, Edward." The
enamoured caricaturist vainly protested that he had not seen it from the
beginning, and did not now. He recalled to her that she had said he was
'her first.' She admitted the truth, with eyes dwelling on him, until a
ringlet got displaced. Her first. To be that, sentimental man would
perish in the fires. To have been that will sometimes console him, even
when he has lived to see what a thing he was who caught the budding
fancy. The unhappy caricaturist groaned between triumph as a leader, and
anguish at the prospect of a possible host of successors. King in that
pure bosom, the thought would come--King of a mighty line, mayhap! And
sentimental man, awakened to this disastrous view of things, endures
shrewder pangs of rivalry in the contemplation of his usurping posterity
than if, as do they, he looked forward to a tricked, perfumed, pommaded
whipster, pirouetting like any Pierrot--the enviable image of the one who
realized her first dream, and to whom specially missioned angels first
opened the golden gates of her heart.

"I have learnt to see, Edward, that you do not honour me with a love you
have diverted from one worthier than I am;" and in answer to the question
whether, though having to abjure her love, she loved him: "No, no; it is
my Arabella I love. I love, I will love, no one but her"--with sundry
caressing ejaculations that spring a thirst for kisses, and a tender
'putting of the case,' now and then.

So much for Adela's part in the conflict. Edward was unaware that the
secret of her mastering him was, that she was now talking common-sense in
the tone of sentiment. He, on the contrary, talked sentiment in the tone
of common-sense. Of course he was beaten: and O, you young lovers, when
you hear the dear lips setting what you call the world's harsh language
to this music, know that an hour has struck for you! It is a fatal sound
to hear. Edward believed that his pleading ha