less high must
be accorded to Mrs. Wentworth's; she attained an altitude of admirable
unconsciousness, and conducted her flirtation (the poverty of language
forces me to the word, but it is over flippant) with the curate in a
staid, quasi-maternal way. She called him a delightful boy, and said
that she was intensely interested in all his aims and hopes.

"What does she want?" I asked Dora, despairingly. "She can't want to
marry him." I was referring to Trix Queenborough, not to Mrs. Wentworth.

"Good gracious, no!" answered Dora, irritably. "It's simple jealousy.
She won't let the poor boy alone till he's in love with her again.
It's a horrible shame!"

"Oh, well, he has great recuperative power," said I.

"She'd better be careful, though. It's a very dangerous game. How do
you suppose Lord Newhaven likes it?"

Accident gave me that very day a hint how little Lord Newhaven liked
it, and a glimpse of the risk Miss Trix was running. Entering the
library suddenly, I heard Newhaven's voice raised above his ordinary
tones.

"I won't stand it," he was declaring. "I never know how she'll treat me
from one minute to the next."

My entrance, of course, stopped the conversation very abruptly.
Newhaven had come to a stand in the middle of the room, and Lady
Queenborough sat on the sofa, a formidable frown on her brow.
Withdrawing myself as rapidly as possible, I argued the probability of
a severe lecture for Miss Trix, ending in a command to try her noble
suitor's patience no longer. I hope all this happened, for I, not
seeing why Mrs. Wentworth should monopolize the grace of sympathy, took
the liberty of extending mine to Newhaven. He was certainly in love
with Trix, not with her money, and the treatment he underwent must have
been as trying to his feelings as it was galling to his pride.

My sympathy was not premature, for Miss Trix's fascinations, which were
indubitably great, began to have their effect. The scene about the
canoe was re-enacted, but with a different denouement. This time the
promise was forgotten, and the widow forsaken. Then Mrs. Wentworth put
on her armor. We had, in fact, reached this very absurd situation that
these two ladies were contending for the favors of, or the domination
over, such an obscure, poverty-stricken, hopelessly ineligible person
as the curate of Poltons undoubtedly was. The position seemed to me
then, and still seems, to indicate some remarkable qualities in that
young man.

A