discover, to the
subject of the Indian officer, and to the remembrance which the
stranger's complexion must have awakened in me of his brother's face.

"I don't understand your telling me you were not frightened when you saw
that man," he said. "You were terribly frightened by my brother, when you
saw him."

"I was terribly frightened by my own imagination, _before_ I saw him," I
answered. "_After_ I saw him, I soon got over it."

"So you say!" he rejoined.

There is something excessively provoking--at least to me--in being told
to my face that I have said something which is not worthy of belief. It
was not a very becoming act on my part (after what he had told me in his
letter about his brother's infatuation) to mention his brother. I ought
not to have done it. I did it, for all that.

"I say what I mean," I replied. "Before I knew what you told me about
your brother, I was going to propose to you, for your sake and for his,
that he should live with us after we were married."

Oscar suddenly stopped. He had given me his arm to lead me through the
crowd--he dropped it now.

"You say that, because you are angry with me!" he said.

I denied being angry with him; I declared, once more, that I was only
speaking the truth.

"You really mean," he went on, "that you could have lived comfortably
with my brother's blue face before you every hour of the day?"

"Quite comfortably--if he would have been my brother too." Oscar pointed
to the house in which my aunt and I are living--within a few yards of the
place on which we stood.

"You are close at home," he said, speaking in an odd muffled voice, with
his eyes on the ground. "I want a longer walk. We shall meet at
dinner-time."

He left me--without looking up, and without saying a word more.

Jealous of his brother! There is something unnatural, something degrading
in such jealousy as that. I am ashamed of myself for thinking it of him.
And yet what else could his conduct mean?

[Note.--It is for me to answer that question. Give the miserable wretch
his due. His conduct meant, in one plain word--remorse. The only excuse
left that he could make to his own conscience for the infamous part which
he was playing, was this--that his brother's personal disfigurement
presented a fatal obstacle in the way of his brother's marriage. And now
Lucilla's own words, Lucilla's own actions, had told him that Oscar's
face was no obstacle to her seeing Oscar perpetually in the fami