r you had Mr. Ladywell.'

'O, don't name him!'

'I wouldn't have Mr. Neigh at any price, nevertheless. It is about him
that I was going to tell you.' Picotee proceeded to relate Menlove's
account of the story of Ethelberta's escapade, which had been dragged
from Neigh the previous evening by the friend to whom he had related it
before he was so enamoured of Ethelberta as to regard that performance as
a positive virtue in her. 'Nobody was told, or even suspected, who the
lady of the anecdote was,' Picotee concluded; 'but I knew instantly, of
course, and I think it very unfortunate that we ever went to that
dreadful ghostly estate of his, Berta.'

Ethelberta's face heated with mortification. She had no fear that Neigh
had told names or other particulars which might lead to her
identification by any friend of his, and she could make allowance for
bursts of confidence; but there remained the awkward fact that he himself
knew her to be the heroine of the episode. What annoyed her most was
that Neigh could ever have looked upon her indiscretion as a humorous
incident, which he certainly must have done at some time or other to
account for his telling it. Had he been angry with her, or sneered at
her for going, she could have forgiven him; but to see her manoeuvre in
the light of a joke, to use it as illustrating his grim theory of
womankind, and neither to like nor to dislike her the more for it from
first to last, this was to treat her with a cynicism which was
intolerable. That Neigh's use of the incident as a stock anecdote ceased
long before he had decided to ask her to marry him she had no doubt, but
it showed that his love for her was of that sort in which passion makes
war upon judgment, and prevails in spite of will. Moreover, he might
have been speaking ironically when he alluded to the act as a virtue in a
woman, which seemed the more likely when she remembered his cool bearing
towards her in the drawing-room. Possibly it was an antipathetic
reaction, induced by the renewed recollection of her proceeding.

'I will never marry Mr. Neigh!' she said, with decision. 'That shall
settle it. You need not think over any such contingency, Picotee. He is
one of those horrid men who love with their eyes, the remainder part of
him objecting all the time to the feeling; and even if his objections
prove the weaker, and the man marries, his general nature conquers again
by the time the wedding trip is over, so that t