say there will be as
it is. At any rate, I want to do the thing like a gentleman."

"Send 'em to Tattersall's." (Puff.)

"And the girl that drives them in the park, and draws all the duchesses
and countesses at her tail--am I to send her to Tattersall's?" (Puff.)

"Oh, it is _her_ you want to put down, then?"

"Why, of course."

CHAPTER II.

SIR CHARLES and Mr. Oldfield settled that lady's retiring pension, and
Mr. Oldfield took the memoranda home, with instructions to prepare a
draft deed for Miss Somerset's approval.

Meantime Sir Charles visited Miss Bruce every day. Her affections for
him grew visibly, for being engaged gave her the courage to love.

Mr. Bassett called pretty often; but one day he met Sir Charles on the
stairs, and scowled.

That scowl cost him dear, for Sir Charles thereupon represented to
Bella that a man with a grievance is a bore to the very eye, and asked
her to receive no more visits from his scowling cousin. The lady
smiled, and said, with soft complacency, "I obey."

Sir Charles's gallantry was shocked.

"No, don't say 'obey.' It is a little favor I ventured to ask."

"It is like you to ask what you have a right to command. I shall be out
to him in future, and to every one who is disagreeable to you. What!
does 'obey' frighten you from my lips? To me it is the sweetest in the
language. Oh, please let me 'obey' you! _May_ I?"

Upon this, as vanity is seldom out of call, Sir Charles swelled like a
turkey-cock, and loftily consented to indulge Bella Bruce's strange
propensity. From that hour she was never at home to Mr. Bassett.

He began to suspect; and one day, after he had been kept out with the
loud, stolid "Not at home" of practiced mendacity, he watched, and saw
Sir Charles admitted.

He divined it all in a moment, and turned to wormwood. What! was he to
be robbed of the lady he loved--and her fifteen thousand pounds--by the
very man who had robbed him of his ancestral fields? He dwelt on the
double grievance till it nearly frenzied him. But he could do nothing:
it was his fate. His only hope was that Sir Charles, the arrant flirt,
would desert this beauty after a time, as he had the others.

But one afternoon, in the smoking-room of his club, a gentleman said to
him, "So your cousin Charles is engaged to the Yorkshire beauty, Bell
Bruce?"

"He is flirting with her, I believe," said Richard.

"No, no," said the other; "they are engaged. I know it for a fact. Th