etween them. He is so impracticable. And I have
been making opportunities for them to meet. After all, she is Sir Denis
Drummond's only child, and is sure to be sufficiently well off. And
here, after all my trouble, I find she is engaged to her cousin. I
wonder what she can see in that ugly stick to prefer him to Godfrey!"

"She may not prefer him, my dear. It may be a marriage of convenience.
And Drummond is not a stick. That is your feminine prejudice. He is a
very clever fellow, although he has got the Socialistic bee in his
bonnet. However, he's young, and has time to mend his ways."

"I don't want to discuss him. How coldblooded you are, Cyprian! I can
only think of my poor Godfrey going off to the ends of the earth, and
his being deceived and hurt by that heartless girl."

"You will let him know?"

"I certainly shall. He ought to know. It may be the quickest way to make
him forget her."

"Since he seems to have made up his mind to go away without speaking to
her, I can't see that any great harm has been done," Mr. Rooke said,
with his masculine common-sense.

"I shall never forgive her," Mrs. Rooke retorted, with true feminine
inconsequence.

She took an early opportunity of telling her brother what the Dowager
had told her. The occasion was in her own drawing-room at the
afternoon-tea hour, and, since the room was only lit by firelight and a
tall standard lamp, his face, where he stood by the mantel-shelf, was in
shadow. There had been something portentous in the manner of the
telling.

For a few seconds he kept silence. Then he spoke very quietly.

"I hope Miss Drummond may be happy," he said. He did not trouble to put
on a pretence of indifference with Bel, just as he did not wish to talk
about it. He went on to speak of ordinary topics. That evening he stayed
to dinner. He had only a week more in England. Under the electric light
at the dinner-table his haggardness was revealed.

"For once," said Cyprian Rooke afterwards, "your discovery wasn't a
mare's nest, my dear Bel. Godfrey looks hard hit."

The week turned round quietly. Nelly had not heard definitely the date
of Captain Langrishe's departure. For six days she kept away from the
Rookes' house. On that last evening he had been icily cold. The poor
girl was in torture. All the week she was calling pride to her aid. The
sixth day it refused to bolster her up any longer. The sixth day she met
at lunch a friend of hers and Belinda Rooke's. She a