Tozer! This was another complication. She had taken so great a
romantic interest in the heroine of that ball, which was the most
entrancing moment of Ursula's life, that it seemed a kind of disloyalty
to her dreams to give up thus completely, and dethrone the young lady in
black; but what could the poor girl do? In the excitement of this
question the personality of Reginald's special assailant was lost
altogether: the girls did not even remember his name.

CHAPTER XXI.

A NEW FRIEND.

After this there followed an exciting interval for the family at the
Parsonage. Reginald, with the impatience of anger, insisted upon
transporting himself to the College at once, and entering upon "his
duties," such as they were, in defiance of all public comment. And Mr.
May, delighted with the head-strong resentment which served his purpose
so well, promoted it by all the means in his power, goading his son on,
if he showed any signs of relaxing, by references to public opinion, and
what the Liberation Society would say. Before those curtains were ready,
which the girls had ordered with so much pride, or the carpet laid down,
he had taken possession, and his room in the Parsonage was already
turned upside down preparing for a new inmate. Many and strange were the
thoughts in Ursula's mind about this new inmate. She remembered Clarence
Copperhead as a full-grown man, beyond, it seemed to her, the age at
which pupilage was possible. What was he coming to Carlingford for? What
was he coming to the Parsonage for? What could papa do with a pupil
quite as old as Reginald, who, in his own person, had often taken
pupils? Ursula had read as many novels as were natural at her age, and
can it be supposed that she did not ask herself whether there was any
other meaning in it? Could he be coming to Carlingford on account of
Miss Beecham; or, on account of--any one else? Ursula never whispered,
even to her own imagination, on account of me. But it is not to be
supposed that the unbidden inarticulate thought did not steal in,
fluttering her girlish soul. Everybody knows that in fiction, at least,
such things occur continually, and are the most natural things in the
world; and to Ursula, beyond her own little commonplace world, which she
somewhat despised, and the strange world undeciphered and wonderful to
which the Dorsets had introduced her for those ten brief days in London,
the world of fiction was the only sphere she knew; and in that s