f man who, as a rule, cared to dawdle about all day with women when
there was any kind of sport to be had from hunting down to ratting; more
especially was he disinclined for any such dawdling when Helen Romer was
amongst the number of the ladies so left to be danced attendance upon.
And yet he distinctly told himself that he meant to be devoted for this
one day to the fair sex. All yesterday he had been crossed and put out;
the men had been out shooting from breakfast till dinner; some of the
ladies had joined them with the Irish-stew at lunch time; Helen had been
amongst them, but not Miss Nevill. Maurice, in spite of the pheasants
having been plentiful and the sport satisfactory, had been in a decidedly
bad temper all the afternoon in consequence. In the evening the party at
dinner had been enlarged by an influx of country neighbours; Vera had
been hopelessly divided from him and absorbed by other people the whole
evening; he had not exchanged a single word with her all day.

Captain Kynaston was seized with an insatiable desire to improve his
acquaintance with his sister-in-law to be. It was his duty, he told
himself, to make friends with her; his brother would be hurt, he argued,
and his mother would be annoyed if he neglected to pay a proper attention
to the future Lady Kynaston. There could be no doubt that it was his
duty; that it was also his pleasure did not strike him so forcibly as it
should have done, considering the fact that a man is only very keen to
create duties for himself when they are proportionately mingled with that
which is pleasant and agreeable. The exigencies of his position, with
regard to his elder brother's bride having been forcibly borne in upon
him--combined possibly with the certain knowledge that the elder brother
himself would be hunting all day--compelled him to stop at home and
devote himself to Vera. Mr. Herbert Pryme, however, had no such excuse,
real or imaginary, and yet he stands idly by the corridor window, idly,
yet perfectly patiently--relieving the tedium of his position by the
unexciting entertainment of softly whistling the popular airs from the
"Cloches de Corneville" below his breath.

Herbert Pryme is a good-looking young fellow of about six-and-twenty; he
looks his profession all over, and is a good type of the average young
barrister of the present day. He has fair hair, and small, close-cropped
whiskers; his face is retrieved from boyishness by strongly-marked
and r