et the poor boy alone till he's in love with her again.
It's a horrible shame!"

"Oh, well, he has great recuperative power," said I.

"She'd better be careful, though. It's a very dangerous game. How do
you suppose Lord Newhaven likes it?"

Accident gave me that very day a hint how little Lord Newhaven liked
it, and a glimpse of the risk Miss Trix was running. Entering the
library suddenly, I heard Newhaven's voice raised above his ordinary
tones.

"I won't stand it!" he was declaring. "I never know how she'll treat
me from one minute to the next."

My entrance, of course, stopped the conversation very abruptly.
Newhaven had come to a stand in the middle of the room, and Lady
Queenborough sat on the sofa, a formidable frown on her brow.
Withdrawing myself as rapidly as possible, I argued the probability of
a severe lecture for Miss Trix, ending in a command to try her noble
suitor's patience no longer. I hope all this happened, for I, not
seeing why Mrs. Wentworth should monopolize the grace of sympathy, took
the liberty of extending mine to Newhaven. He was certainly in love
with Trix, not with her money, and the treatment he underwent must have
been as trying to his feelings as it was galling to his pride.

My sympathy was not premature, for Miss Trix's fascinations, which were
indubitably great, began to have their effect. The scene about the
canoe was re-enacted, but with a different denouement. This time the
promise was forgotten, and the widow forsaken. Then Mrs. Wentworth put
on her armor. We had, in fact, reached this very absurd situation,
that these two ladies were contending for the favors of, or the
domination over, such an obscure, poverty-stricken, hopelessly
ineligible person as the curate of Poltons undoubtedly was. The
position seemed to me then, and still seems, to indicate some
remarkable qualities in that young man.

At last Newhaven made a move. At breakfast, on Wednesday morning, he
announced that, reluctant as he should be to leave Poltons Park, he was
due at his aunt's place, in Kent, on Saturday evening, and must,
therefore, make his arrangements to leave by noon on that day. The
significance was apparent. Had he come down to breakfast with "Now or
Never!" stamped in fiery letters across his brow, it would have been
more obtrusive, indeed, but not a whit plainer. We all looked down at
our plates, except Jack Ives. He flung one glance (I saw it out of the
corner of my left