ly due from her. Kate was acquainted with all the
circumstances of that old affair between her brother and Alice. She
had given in her adhesion to the propriety of what Alice had done.
She had allowed that her brother George's behaviour had been such as
to make any engagement between them impossible. The fault, therefore,
had been hers in making any reference to the question of such a
marriage. Nor had it been by any means her first fault of the same
kind. Till Alice had become engaged to Mr Grey she had spoken of
George only as her brother, or as her friend's cousin, but now she
was constantly making allusion to those past occurrences, which all
of them should have striven to forget. Under these circumstances was
not Lady Macleod right in saying that George Vavasor should not have
been accepted as a companion for the Swiss tour?

The little dinner-party went off very quietly; and if no other ground
existed for charging Mr Grey with London dissipation than what that
afforded, he was accused most unjustly. The two young men had never
before met each other; and Vavasor had gone to his uncle's house,
prepared not only to dislike but to despise his successor in Alice's
favour. But in this he was either disappointed or gratified, as the
case may be. "He has plenty to say for himself," he said to Kate on
his way home.

"Oh yes; he can talk."

"And he doesn't talk like a prig either, which was what I expected.
He's uncommonly handsome."

"I thought men never saw that in each other. I never see it in any
man."

"I see it in every animal--in men, women, horses, dogs, and even
pigs. I like to look on handsome things. I think people always do who
are ugly themselves."

"And so you're going into raptures in favour of John Grey."

"No, I'm not. I very seldom go into raptures about anything. But he
talks in the way I like a man to talk. How he bowled my uncle over
about those actors; and yet if my uncle knows anything about anything
it is about the stage twenty years ago." There was nothing more said
then about John Grey; but Kate understood her brother well enough to
be aware that this praise meant very little. George Vavasor spoke
sometimes from his heart, and did so more frequently to his sister
than to any one else; but his words came generally from his head.

On the day after the little dinner in Queen Anne Street, John Grey
came to say good-bye to his betrothed;--for his betrothed she
certainly was, in spite of those