may
like you to continue reading to him."

Mr. Vernon rose to open the door for her--Nell noticed the act of
courtesy--then sank down again.

"You don't want any more?" she said, looking at the paper on her knee.

"No, thanks," he said.

She tossed it onto a chair at the other end of the room.

"It is the most awful nonsense," she said, with a girlish frankness.
"Why did you tell mamma that it was interesting?"

He met the direct gaze of the clear gray eyes, and smiled.

"Well--as it happened--it was," he said.

The clear gray eyes opened wider.

"What! All this gossip about the Earl of Angleford, and his nephew, Lord
Selbie?"

He looked down, then raised his eyes, narrowed into slits, and fixed
them above her head.

"I fancy it's true--in the main," he said, half apologetically.

"Well, and if it is," she retorted impatiently, "of what interest can it
be to us? We don't know the Earl of Angleford, and don't care a button
that he is married, and that his nephew is--what do you
say?--disinherited."

"N-o," he admitted.

"Very well, then," she said triumphantly. "It is like reading the doings
of people living in the moon."

"The moon is a long ways off," he ventured.

"Not farther from us than the world in which these earls and lords have
their being," she retorted. "It all seems so--so impertinent to me,
when I am reading it. Of what interest can the lives of these people be
to us, to me, Nell Lorton? I never heard of Lord Angleford, and
Lord--what is it?--Lord Selbie, before; did you?"

He glanced at her, then looked fixedly through the window.

"I've heard of them--yes," he said reluctantly.

"Ah, well, you are better informed than I am," said Nell, laughing
softly. "There's Dick; he's calling me. Do you mind being left? He will
make an awful row if I don't go out."

"Certainly not. Go by all means!" he said. "And thank you for--all the
trouble you have taken."

Nell nodded and hurried out, and Mr. Vernon leaned back and bit at his
mustache thoughtfully, not to say irritably.

"I feel like a bounder," he muttered. "Why the blazes didn't I give my
right name? I wonder what they'd say--how that girl would look--if I
told them that I was the Lord Selbie this rag was cackling about? Shall
I tell them? No. It would be awkward now. I shall be gone in a day or
two, and they needn't know."

CHAPTER V.

The following morning, the carrier's cart stopped at the cottage, and
Dick, having he