heir revels."

The girl acquiesced. The two figures to the left, on the road to
Headlinge, buried themselves in a wooded grove, and the girl glanced a
little apprehensively in their direction, as she caught the last glimpse
of them.

"Denis and Leonetta are on the road to Headlinge," she said simply.

"Oh, are they?" replied Lord Henry. "Can you see them then?"

"No," she answered. "They are somewhere behind those trees."

* * * * *

Two proposals of marriage were made that evening in Brineweald Park. One
was flatly declined; the result of the other was doubtful. The love-sick
swains were Denis Malster and Guy Tyrrell, and their respective
companions we know.

Guy Tyrrell, who was of the breed who scarcely ever receive a
spontaneous kindly look from women, without offering something very
substantial in exchange, was feeling that romantic passion for the
voluptuous Jewess, which the sun and the plentiful food at Brineweald,
had no doubt done an immense deal to fan to a flame in his breast. He
had recognised very early that with Malster about, he stood no chance
with Leonetta, and he found that had it not been for Leonetta's
occupying the central place, he would have stood just as bad a chance
with Vanessa. For two days now, moreover, he had been observing Vanessa
lavishing her attentions on Sir Joseph, and utterly harmless though the
old baronet was, Guy had been conscious of certain intolerable pangs
when he had seen the girl's shapely little brown hands in the City
magnate's, and her strong nicely rounded forearm enlocked in his
master's.

Tremulously, therefore, but with studious persistency, he had that
evening repeatedly whispered the request to her that she should walk out
to the woods with him, and she, casting a longing glance first at Lord
Henry, then at Denis Malster, had reluctantly acquiesced. Her curiosity
was possibly awakened too; at all events she went, when she had no
pressing need to go, and incidentally received the entertainment she
deserved.

He was agitated, as all "clean-minded" young men are, whose amorous
passions have for once got the better of their qualms, and he breathed
very heavily,--rather like a draft-ox at the turn of the plough. He was
gauche, timid, thoroughly unskilled in the art of wooing, not even up to
the wiles of the most guileless male animal or bird; and Vanessa felt
only a sensation of extreme discomfiture as he blurted out his longing