very often together without her.

Johnstone enjoyed the young girl's society, and did not pretend to deny
the fact in his own thoughts. Whatever mischief he might have been in
while on the yacht, his natural instincts were simple and honest. In a
certain way, Clare was a revelation to him of something to which he had
never been accustomed, and which he had most carefully avoided. He had
no sisters, and as a boy he had not been thrown with girls. He was an
only son, and his mother, a very practical woman, had warned him as he
grew up that he was a great match, and had better avoid young girls
altogether until he saw one whom he should like to marry, though how he
was to see that particular one, if he avoided all alike, was a question
into which his mother did not choose to enter. Having first gone into
society upon this principle, however, and having been at once taken up
and made much of by an extremely fashionable young woman afflicted with
an elderly and eccentric husband, it was not likely that Brook would
return to the threshold of the schoolroom for women's society. He went
on as he had begun in his first "salad" days, and at five-and-twenty he
had the reputation of having done more damage than any of his young
contemporaries, while he had never once shown the slightest inclination
to marry. His mother, always a practical woman, did not press the
question of marriage, deeming that with his disposition he would stand a
better chance of married peace when he had expended a good deal of what
she called his vivacity; and his father, who came of very long-lived
people, always said that no man should take a wife before he was thirty.
As Brook did not gamble immoderately, nor start a racing stable, nor
propose to manage an opera troupe, the practical lady felt that he was
really a very good young man. His father liked him for his own sake; but
as Adam Johnstone had been gay in his youth, in spite of his sober
Scotch blood, even beyond the bounds of ordinary "fastness," the fact of
his being fond of Brook was not of itself a guarantee that the latter
was such a very good young man as his mother said that he was. Somehow
or other Brook had hitherto managed to keep clear of any entanglement
which could hamper his life, probably by virtue of that hardness which
he had shown to poor Lady Fan, and which had so strongly prejudiced
Clare Bowring against him. His father said cynically that the lad was
canny. Hitherto he had certain