eekly waiting for his tea, while Lesbia took a
languid survey of the shore and the flotilla of boats, little and big,
and while Lady Kirkbank rhapsodised about the yacht, praising
everything, and calling everything by a wrong name. He was to be their
guest all day, and every day. They were to have enough of him, as Lesbia
had observed to her chaperon, with a spice of discontent, not quite so
delighted with the arrangement as her faithful swain. To him the idea
was rapture.

'You have contrived somehow to keep me very much at a distance
hitherto,' he told Lesbia, 'and I feel sometimes as if we were almost
strangers; but a yacht is the best place in the world to bring two
people together, and a week at Cowes will make us nearer to each other
and more to each other than three months in London;' and Lesbia had said
nothing, inwardly revolting at the idea of becoming any nearer and
dearer to this man whom she had pledged herself to marry. She was to be
his wife--yes, some day--and it was his desire the some day should be
soon: but in the interval her dearest privilege was the power to keep
him at a distance.

And yet she could not make up her mind to break with him, to say
honestly, 'I never liked you much, and now we are engaged I find myself
liking you less and less every day. Save me from the irrevocable
wickedness of a loveless marriage. Forgive me, and let me go.' No, this
she could not bring herself to say. She did not like Mr. Smithson, but
she valued the position he was able to give her. She wanted to be
mistress of that infinite wealth--she could not renounce that right to
which she fancied she had been born, her right to be one of the Queens
of Society: and the only man who had offered to crown her as queen, to
find her a palace and a court, was Horace Smithson. Without Mr. Smithson
her first season would have resulted in dire failure. She might perhaps
have endured that failure, and been content to abide the chances of a
second season, had it not been for Mary's triumph. But for Mary to be a
Countess, and for Lesbia to remain Lesbia Haselden, a nobody, dependent
upon the caprices of a grandmother whose means might after all be but
limited--no, such a concatenation as that was not to be endured. Lesbia
told herself that she could not go back to Fellside to remain there
indefinitely, a spinster and a dependent. She had learnt the true value
of money; she had found out what the world was like; and it seemed to
her