impertinent for a mere looker-on like myself to
have any views at all about this marriage," Honoria put in quickly.

"Bless you, no, it's not," he answered. "I don't see how anybody can
very well be off having views about it--that's just the nuisance. The
whole thing shouts, confound it. So you might just as well let me hear
your views, Miss St. Quentin. I should be awfully interested. They
might help to straighten my own out a bit."

Honoria paused a moment, doubting how much of her thought it would be
justifiable to confide to her companion. A certain vein of
knight-errantry in her character inclined her to set lance in rest and
ride forth, rather recklessly, to redress human wrongs. But in
redressing one wrong it too often happens that another wrong--or
something perilously approaching one--must be inflicted. To save pain
in one direction is, unhappily, to inflict pain in the opposite one.
Honoria was aware how warmly Lady Calmady desired this marriage. She
loved Lady Calmady. Therefore her loyalty was engaged, and yet----

"I am no match-maker," she said at last, "and so probably my view is
unnecessarily pessimistic. But I happened to see Lady Constance just
now, and I cannot pretend that she struck me as looking conspicuously
happy."

Lord Shotover flattened his shoulders against the back of the sofa,
expanding his chest and thrusting his hands still farther into his
pockets with a movement at once of anxiety and satisfaction.

"I don't believe she is," he asserted. "Upon my word you're right. I
don't believe she is. I doubted it from the first, and now I'm pretty
certain. Of course I know I'm a bad lot, Miss St. Quentin. I've been
very little but a confounded nuisance to my people ever since I was
born. They're all ten thousand times better than I am, and they're
doing what they honestly think right. All the same I believe they're
making a ghastly mistake. They're selling the poor, little girl against
her will, that's about the long and short of it."

He bowed himself together, looking at his companion from under his
eyebrows, and speaking with more seriousness than she had ever heard
him yet speak.

"I tell you it makes me a little sick sometimes to see what excellent,
well-meaning people will do with girls in respect of marriage. Oh, good
Lord! it just does! But then a high moral tone doesn't come quite
gracefully from me. I know that. I'm jolly well out of it. It's not for
me to preach. And so I though