pleasure her keen zest of appreciation gave him compared
with Cornelia's grave smile, which had often kindled in him profane
doubts of the positive brightness, or rapidity of her intelligence.

"Besworth at sunset! What a glorious picture to have living before you
every day!" said Lady Charlotte to her companion.

Wilfrid flushed. She read his look; and said, when they were out of
hearing, "What a place for old people to sit here near the end of life!
The idea of it makes one almost forgive the necessity for getting
old--doesn't it? Tracy Runningbrook might make a poem about silver heads
and sunset--something, you know! Very easy cantering then--no hunting! I
suppose one wouldn't have even a desire to go fast--a sort of cock-horse,
just as we began with. The stables, let me tell you, are too near the
scullery. One is bound to devise measures for the protection of the
morals of the household."

While she was speaking, Wilfrid's thoughts ran: "My time has come to
strike for liberty."

This too she perceived, and was prepared for him.

He said: "Lady Charlotte, I feel that I must tell you...I fear that I
have been calculating rather more hopefully..." Here the pitfall of
sentiment yawned before him on a sudden. "I mean" (he struggled to avoid
it, but was at the brink in the next sentence) "--I mean, dear lady, that
I had hopes...Besworth pleased you... to offer you this..."

"With yourself?" she relieved him. A different manner in a protesting
male would have charmed her better. She excused him, knowing what stood
in his way.

"That I scarcely dared to hope," said Wilfrid, bewildered to see the
loose chain he had striven to cast off gather tightly round him.

"You do hope it?"

"I have."

"You have hoped that I..." (she was not insolent by nature, and corrected
the form) "--to marry me?"

"Yes, Lady Charlotte, I--I had that hope...if I could have offered this
place--Besworth. I find that my father will never buy it; I have
misunderstood him."

He fixed his eyes on her, expecting a cool, or an ironical, rejoinder to
end the colloquy;--after which, fair freedom! She answered, "We may do
very well without it."

Wilfrid was not equal to a start and the trick of rapturous astonishment.
He heard the words like the shooting of dungeon-bolts, thinking, "Oh,
heaven! if at the first I had only told the woman I do not love her!" But
that sentimental lead had ruined him. And, on second thoughts, how could
he have spok