so well as you like Dicky, _you_ love him according to your own
statement."

"Don't be matter-of-fact!" says Miss Kavanagh, giving him a
well-deserved snub. "Do you always say exactly what you mean?"

"Always--to _you_."

"I daresay you would be more interesting if you didn't," says she, with
a little, lovely smile, that quite spoils the harshness of her words. Of
her few faults, perhaps the greatest is, that she seldom knows her own
mind, where her lovers are concerned, and will blow hot and cold, and
merry and sad, and cheerful, and petulant all in one breath as it were.
Poor lovers! they have a hard time of it with her as a rule. But youth
is often so, and the cold, still years, as they creep on us, with dull
common sense and deadly reason in their train, cure us all too soon of
our pretty idle follies.

Just now she was bent on rebuffing him, but you see her strength failed
her, and she spoiled her effect by the smile she mingled with the
rebuff. The smile indeed was so charming that he remembers nothing but
it, and so she not only gains nothing, but loses something to the other
side.

"Well, I'll try to mend all that," says he, but so lovingly, and with
such unaffected tenderness, that she quails beneath his glance. Coquette
as undoubtedly Nature has made her, she has still so gentle a soul
within her bosom that she shrinks from inflicting _actual_ pain. A pang
or two, a passing regret to be forgotten the next hour--or at all events
in the next change of scene--she is not above imparting, but when people
grow earnest like--like Mr. Dysart for example--they grow troublesome.
And she hasn't made up her mind to marry, and there are other people----

"The Clontarfs are to be there too," goes on Dysart, who is a cousin of
Lady Baltimore's, and knows all about her arrangements; "and the
Brownings, and Norman Beauclerk."

"The--Clontarfs," says Joyce, in a hurried way, that might almost be
called confused; to the man who loves her, and who is watching her, it
is quite plain that she is not thinking of Lord and Lady Clontarf, who
are quite an ordinary couple and devoted to each other, but of that last
name spoken--Norman Beauclerk; Lady Baltimore's brother, a man,
handsome, agreeable, aristocratic--the man whose attentions to her a
month ago had made a little topic for conversation amongst the country
people. Dull country people who never go anywhere or see anything beyond
their stupid selves, and who are therefore