would have charmed her better. She excused him, knowing what stood
in his way.

"That I scarcely dared to hope," said Wilfrid, bewildered to see the
loose chain he had striven to cast off gather tightly round him.

"You do hope it?"

"I have."

"You have hoped that I..." (she was not insolent by nature, and
corrected the form) "--to marry me?"

"Yes, Lady Charlotte, I--I had that hope...if I could have offered
this place--Besworth. I find that my father will never buy it; I have
misunderstood him."

He fixed his eyes on her, expecting a cool, or an ironical, rejoinder to
end the colloquy;--after which, fair freedom! She answered, "We may do
very well without it."

Wilfrid was not equal to a start and the trick of rapturous
astonishment. He heard the words like the shooting of dungeon-bolts,
thinking, "Oh, heaven! if at the first I had only told the woman I do
not love her!" But that sentimental lead had ruined him. And, on second
thoughts, how could he have spoken thus to the point, when they had
never previously dealt in anything save sentimental implications? The
folly was in his speaking at all. The game was now in Lady Charlotte's
hands.

Adela, in another part of the field, had released herself by a
consummate use of the same weapon Wilfrid had so clumsily handled. Her
object was to put an end to the absurd and compromising sighs of Edward
Buxley; and she did so with the amiable contempt of a pupil dismissing
a first instructor in an art "We saw from the beginning it could not
be, Edward." The enamoured caricaturist vainly protested that he had not
seen it from the beginning, and did not now. He recalled to her that she
had said he was 'her first.' She admitted the truth, with eyes
dwelling on him, until a ringlet got displaced. Her first. To be that,
sentimental man would perish in the fires. To have been that will
sometimes console him, even when he has lived to see what a thing he was
who caught the budding fancy. The unhappy caricaturist groaned between
triumph as a leader, and anguish at the prospect of a possible host of
successors. King in that pure bosom, the thought would come--King of a
mighty line, mayhap! And sentimental man, awakened to this disastrous
view of things, endures shrewder pangs of rivalry in the contemplation
of his usurping posterity than if, as do they, he looked forward to a
tricked, perfumed, pommaded whipster, pirouetting like any Pierrot--the
enviable image of the one who