d not have been refused! How nearly he had
decided to do at once what might still be put off till to-morrow! And he
_must_ marry; he often told himself so. She was there beside him on the
yellow brocade ottoman. She was much too good for him; but she liked
him. Should he do it--now? he asked himself, as he watched the slender
gloved hand swaying the feather fan with monotonous languor.

But when he took her back to the ball-room, back to an expectant, tired
mother, he had not done it. He should be at their house in Scotland
later. He thought he would wait till then. He breathed a long sigh of
relief, in the quiet darkness now, at the thought that he had not done
it. He had a haunting presentiment that neither in the purple heather,
any more than in a London ball-room, would he be able to pass beyond
that "certain point" to which, in divers companionship, with or without
assistance, he had so often attained.

For Charles was genuinely anxious to marry. He regarded with the
greatest interest every eligible and ineligible young woman whom he came
across. If Lady Mary had been aware of the very serious light in which
he had considered Miss Louisa Smith, youngest daughter of a certain
curate Smith, who in his youth had been originally extracted from a
refreshment-room at Liverpool to become an ornament of the Church, that
lady would have swooned with horror. But neither Miss Louisa Smith, with
her bun and sandwich ancestry, nor the eighth Lord Breakwater's young
and lovely sister, though both willing to undertake the situation, were
either of them finally offered it. Charles remained free as air, and a
dreadful stigma gradually attached to him as a heartless flirt and a
perverter of young girls' minds from men of more solid worth. A man who
pleases easily and is hard to please soon gets a bad name
among--mothers. I don't think Lady Hope-Acton thought very kindly of
him, as she sped up to Scotland in the night mail.

Perhaps he was not so much to blame as she thought. Long ago, ten long
years ago, in the reckless days of which Lady Mary had then made so
much, and now made so little, poor Charles had been deeply in love with
a good woman, a gentle, quiet girl, who after a time had married his
brother Ralph. No one had suspected his attachment--Ralph and Evelyn
least of all--but several years elapsed before he found time to visit
them at Atherstone; and I think his fondness for Molly had its origin in
his feeling for her moth