“What difference can my age make?” asked he.

“Every difference,” said Lady Verner.  “Were you an old man, you might not be thinking of getting married; as it is, you will be.  Your wife will reign at Verner’s Pride, Lionel.”

Lionel made no answer.

“You will be marrying sometime, I suppose?” reiterated Lady Verner, with emphasis.

“I suppose I shall be,” replied Lionel; and his eyes, as he spoke, involuntarily strayed to Lucy.  She caught the look, and blushed vividly.

“How much of that do you intend to drink, Miss Lucy?” asked Lionel, as she sipped the tumbler of lemonade, at her elbow.

“Ever so many tumblers of it,” she answered.  “Jan said I was to keep sipping it all day long.  The water, going down slowly, heals the chest.”

“I believe if Jan told you to drink boiling water, you’d do it, Lucy,” cried Lady Verner.  “You seem to fall in with all he says.”

“Because I like him, Lady Verner.  Because I have faith in him; and if Jan prescribes a thing, I know that he has faith in it.”

“It is not displaying a refined taste to like Jan,” observed Lady Verner, intending the words as a covert reprimand to Lucy.

But Lucy stood up for Jan.  Even at the dread of openly disagreeing with Lady Verner, Lucy would not be unjust to one whom she deemed of sterling worth.

“I like Jan very much,” said she resolutely, in her championship.  “There’s nobody I like so well as Jan, Lady Verner.”

Lady Verner made a slight movement with her shoulders.  It was almost as much as to say that Lucy was growing as hopelessly incorrigible as Jan.  Lionel turned to Lucy.

“Nobody you like so well as Jan, did you say?”

Poor Lucy!  If the look of Lionel, just before, had brought the hot blush to her cheek, that blush was nothing compared to the glowing crimson which mantled there now.  She had not been thinking of one sort of liking when she so spoke of Jan:  the words had come forth in the honest simplicity of her heart.

Did Lionel read the signs aright, as her eyes fell before his?  Very probably.  A smile stole over his lips.

“I do like Jan very much,” stammered Lucy, essaying to mend the matter.  “I may like him, I suppose?  There’s no harm in it.”

“Oh! no harm, certainly,” spoke Lady Verner, with a spice of irony.  “I never thought Jan could be a favourite before.  Not being fastidiously polished yourself, Lucy—­forgive my saying it—­you entertain, I conclude, a fellow feeling for Jan.”

Lucy—­for Jan’s sake—­would not be beaten.

“Don’t you think it is better to be like Jan, Lady Verner, than—­than—­like Dr. West, for instance?”

“In what way?” returned Lady Verner.

“Jan is so true,” debated Lucy, ignoring the question.

“And Dr. West was not, I suppose,” retorted Lady Verner.  “He wrote false prescriptions, perhaps?  Gave false advice?”