ve
sacrificed a nameless more. And for what? he asked again. For the
favourable looks and tongues of these women whose looks and tongues he
detested!

"Dr Middleton says he is indebted to me: I am deeply in his debt," he
remarked.

"It is we who are in your debt for a lovely romance, my dear Sir
Willoughby," said Lady Busshe, incapable of taking a correction, so
thoroughly had he imbued her with his fiction, or with the belief that
she had a good story to circulate. Away she drove, rattling her tongue
to Lady Culmer.

"A hat and horn, and she would be in the old figure of a post-boy on a
hue-and-cry sheet," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

Willoughby thanked the great lady for her services, and she
complimented the polished gentleman on his noble self-possession. But
she complained at the same time of being defrauded of her "charmer"
Colonel De Craye, since luncheon. An absence of warmth in her
compliment caused Willoughby to shrink and think the wretched shirt he
had got from the world no covering after all: a breath flapped it.

"He comes to me to-morrow, I believe," she said, reflecting on her
superior knowledge of facts in comparison with Lady Busshe, who would
presently be hearing of something novel, and exclaiming: "So, that is
why you patronized the colonel!" And it was nothing of the sort, for
Mrs. Mountstuart could honestly say she was not the woman to make a
business of her pleasure.

"Horace is an enviable fellow," said Willoughby, wise in The Book,
which bids us ever, for an assuagement to fancy our friend's condition
worse than our own, and recommends the deglutition of irony as the most
balsamic for wounds in the whole moral pharmacopoeia.

"I don't know," she replied, with a marked accent of deliberation.

"The colonel is to have you to himself to-morrow!"

"I can't be sure of what I shall have in the colonel!"

"Your perpetual sparkler?"

Mrs. Mountstuart set her head in motion. She left the matter silent.

"I'll come for him in the morning," she said, and her carriage whirled
her off. Either she had guessed it, or Clara had confided to her the
treacherous passion of Horace De Craye.

However, the world was shut away from Patterne for the night.

CHAPTER XLVII

SIR WILLOUGHBY AND HIS FRIEND HORACE DE CRAYE

Willoughby shut himself up in his laboratory to brood awhile after the
conflict. Sounding through himself, as it was habitual with him to do,
for the plan most agreeable to his taste,