ell your papa, and we'll go to
Brayboro' at once. It's too bad, and I won't bear it."

"What would you have me do?" said Gus, standing up for herself
fiercely.

Gus did ride, and so did Josephine, and there was a servant with them
of course. It had been Emily's turn,--there being two horses for the
three girls; but Gus had declared that no good could come if Emily
went;--and Emily's going had been stopped by parental authority.
"You do as you're bid," said Sir George, "or you'll get the worst of
it." Sir George suffered much from gout, and had obtained from the
ill-temper which his pangs produced a mastery over his daughters
which some fathers might have envied.

"You behaved badly to me last night, Mr. Newton," said Gus, on
horseback. There was another young man riding with Josephine, so that
the lovers were alone together.

"Behaved badly to you?"

"Yes, you did, and I felt it very much,--very much indeed."

"How did I behave badly?"

"If you do not know, I'm sure that I shall not tell you." Ralph did
not know;--but he went home from his ride an unengaged man, and may
perhaps have been thought to behave badly on that occasion also.

But Lady Eardham, though she was sometimes despondent and often
cross, was gifted with perseverance. A picnic party up the river
from Maidenhead to Cookham was got up for the 30th of May, and Ralph
Newton of course was there. Just at that time the Neefit persecution
was at its worst. Letters directed by various hands came to him
daily, and in all of them he was asked when he meant to be on the
square. He knew the meaning of that picnic as well as does the
reader,--as well as did Lady Eardham; but it had come to that with
him that he was willing to yield. It cannot exactly be said for him
that out of all the feminine worth that he had seen, he himself had
chosen Gus Eardham as being the most worthy,--or even that he had
chosen her as being to him the most charming. But it was evident
to him that he must get married, and why not to her as well as to
another? She had style, plenty of style; and, as he told himself,
style for a man in his position was more than anything else. It can
hardly be said that he had made up his mind to offer to her before
he started for Cookham,--though doubtless through all the remaining
years of his life he would think that his mind had been so
fixed,--but he had concluded, that if she were thrown at his head
very hard, he might as well take her. "I don'