own mind whether I should go and call in Lowndes Square
or not: if anybody heard of it, they would think it odd for me alone, of
all the family, to continue acquainted with a girl whom report
(circulated through Lady Clive) said had used Earlscourt so ill, and
wrong constructions might get put upon it; but, thank God! I never have
considered the qu'en dira-t-on. If constructions are wrong, to the deuce
with them! they matter nothing to sensible people; and the man who lives
in dread of "reports" will have to shift his conduct as the old man of
immortal fable shifted his donkey, and won't ever journey in any peace
at all. If anybody remarked my visiting Lowndes Square, I couldn't help
it: I wanted to see Beatrice Boville again, and to Lowndes Square, after
the concert, I drove my tilbury accordingly, which, as that turn-out is
known pretty tolerably in those parts, I should be wisest to leave
behind me when I don't want my calls noticed. By good fortune, I saw
Beatrice alone. They were going to drive in the Park, and she was in the
drawing room, dressed and waiting for her aunt. She was not altered: at
her age sorrow doesn't tell physically as it does at Earlscourt's. In
youth we have Hope; later on we know that of all the gifts of Pandora's
box none are so treacherous and delusive as the one that Pandora left at
the bottom. True, Beatrice had none of that insouciant, shadowless
brightness that had been her chief charm at Lemongenseidlitz, but she
was one of those women whose attractions, dependent on fascination, not
on beauty, grow more instead of less as time goes on. She met me with a
trace of embarrassment; but she was always self-possessed under any
amount of difficulties, and stood chatting, a trifle hurriedly, of all
the subjects of the year, of anything, I dare say, rather than of that
speech the night before, or of the secret of which I was her sole
confidant. But I was not going to let her off so easily. I had come
there for a definite purpose, and was not going away without
accomplishing it. I was afraid every second that Lady Mechlin might come
down, or some visitor enter, and as she sat in a low chair among the
flowers in the window, leant towards her, and plunged into it _in medias
res_.

"Miss Boville, I want you to release me from my promise."

She looked up, her face flushing slightly, but her lips and eyes
shadowed already with that determined pride and hauteur that they had
worn the last time I had