"

Dora did not ask the curate to dinner that night, but he dropped in
about nine o'clock to ask her opinion as to the hymns on Sunday; and
finding Miss Trix and Newhaven in the small drawing room, he sat down
and talked to them. This was too much for Trix; she had treated him
very kindly and had allowed him to amuse her; but it was impossible to
put up with presumption of that kind. Difficult as it was to
discourage Mr. Ives, she did it, and he went away with a disconsolate,
puzzled expression. At the last moment, however, Trix so far relented
as to express a hope that he was coming to tennis to-morrow, at which
he brightened up a little. I do not wish to be uncharitable--least of
all to a charming young lady---but my opinion is that Miss Trix did not
wish to set the curate altogether adrift. I think, however, that Lady
Queenborough must have spoken again, for when Jack did come to tennis,
Trix treated him with most freezing civility and a hardly disguised
disdain, and devoted herself to Lord Newhaven with as much assiduity as
her mother could wish. We men, over our pipes, expressed the opinion
that Jack Ives' little hour of sunshine was past, and that nothing was
left to us but to look on at the prosperous, uneventful course of Lord
Newhaven's wooing. Trix had had her fun (so Algy Stanton bluntly
phrased it) and would now settle down to business.

"I believe, though," he added, "that she likes the curate a bit, you
know."

During the whole of the next day--Wednesday--Jack Ives kept away; he
had, apparently, accepted the inevitable, and was healing his wounded
heart by a strict attention to his parochial duties. Newhaven remarked
on his absence with an air of relief, and Miss Trix treated it as a
matter of no importance; Lady Queenborough was all smiles; and Dora
Polton restricted herself to exclaiming, as I sat by her at tea, in a
low tone and a propos of nothing in particular, "Oh, well--poor Mr.
Ives!"

But on Thursday there occurred an event, the significance of which
passed at the moment unperceived, but which had, in fact, most
important results. This was no other than the arrival of little Mrs.
Wentworth, an intimate friend of Dora's. Mrs. Wentworth had been left
a widow early in life; she possessed a comfortable competence; she was
not handsome, but she was vivacious, amusing, and, above all,
sympathetic. She sympathized at once with Lady Queenborough in her
maternal anxieties, with Trix on her c