refuse me absolutely as far as words go--after what you
did. If it had not been for that I should never have ventured to call. I
might otherwise have supposed your interest to be fixed in another
quarter; but your acting in that manner encouraged me to think you could
listen to a word.'

'What do you allude to?' said Ethelberta. 'How have I acted?'

Neigh appeared reluctant to go any further; but the allusion soon became
sufficiently clear. 'I wish my little place at Farnfield had been
worthier of you,' he said brusquely. 'However, that's a matter of time
only. It is useless to build a house there yet. I wish I had known that
you would be looking over it at that time of the evening. A single word,
when we were talking about it the other day, that you were going to be in
the neighbourhood, would have been sufficient. Nothing could have given
me so much delight as to have driven you round.'

He knew that she had been to Farnfield: that knowledge was what had
inspired him to call upon her to-day! Ethelberta breathed a sort of
exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn. Her
face did not change, since a face must be said not to change while it
preserves the same pleasant lines in the mobile parts as before; but
anybody who has preserved his pleasant lines under the half-minute's peer
of the invidious camera, and found what a wizened, starched kind of thing
they stiffen to towards the end of the time, will understand the tendency
of Ethelberta's lovely features now.

'Yes; I walked round,' said Ethelberta faintly.

Neigh was decidedly master of the position at last; but he spoke as if he
did not value that. His knowledge had furnished him with grounds for
calling upon her, and he hastened to undeceive her from supposing that he
could think ill of any motive of hers which gave him those desirable
grounds.

'I supposed you, by that, to give some little thought to me
occasionally,' he resumed, in the same slow and orderly tone. 'How could
I help thinking so? It was your doing that which encouraged me. Now,
was it not natural--I put it to you?'

Ethelberta was almost exasperated at perceiving the awful extent to which
she had compromised herself with this man by her impulsive visit. Lightly
and philosophically as he seemed to take it--as a thing, in short, which
every woman would do by nature unless hindered by difficulties--it was no
trifle to her as long as he was ignorant of her ju