Meanwhile it had not escaped her that the new agent and Lydia Penfold had arrived together.  It had struck her also that their manner toward each other, as she went to meet them, had been the manner of persons just emerged from a somewhat intimate conversation.  And she already perceived the nascent jealousy in Harry.

Well, no doubt the agent also was to be practised on by these newfangled arts.  For no girl could have had the audacity to make the compact Lydia Penfold had made with Harry, if she were already in love with another man!  No.  Faversham, it was plain, would be the next added to her train.  Victoria beheld the golden-haired creature as the modern Circe, surrounded by troops of ex-suitors—­lovers transmogrified to Friends—­docile at the heel of the sorceress.  You took your chance, received your “No,” and subsided cheerfully into the pen.  Victoria vowed to herself that her Harry should do nothing of the kind!

She looked round her for the presumptuous maiden.  There she was, under a fountain wall in the Italian garden, her white dress gleaming from the warm shadow in which the stone was steeped; Delorme, with an easel, in front.  He was making a rapid charcoal sketch of her, and she was sitting daintily erect, talking and smiling at intervals.  A little way off, a group of people, critical observers of the proceeding, lounged on the grass or in garden chairs; among them, Tatham.  And as he sat watching the sitting, his hat drawn forward over his brow and eyes, although he chatted occasionally with Mrs. Manisty beside him, his mother was miserably certain that he was in truth alive to nothing but the white vision under the wall—­the delicate three-quarter face, with its pointed chin, and the wisps of gold hair blowing about the temples.

And the owner of the face!  Was she quite unmoved by a situation which might, Victoria felt, have strained the nerves even of the experienced?

A slight incident seemed to show that she was not unmoved.  Lydia had shown a keen, girlish pleasure in the prospect of sitting to Delorme, the god, professionally, of her idolatry.  Yet the sketch, for that afternoon, came to nothing.  For after an hour’s sitting Delorme, as usual, became restless and excited, exclaimed at the difficulty of the subject, cursed the light, and finally, in a fit of disgust, wiped out everything he had done.  Lydia rose from her seat, looking rather white, and threw a strange, appealing glance—­the mother caught it—­at her young host.  Tatham sprang up, released her instantly and peremptorily, though Delorme implored for another half-hour.  Lydia, unheard by the artist, gave soft thanks to her deliverer, and, presently, there they were—­she and Harry—­strolling up and down the rose-alleys together, as though nothing, absolutely nothing, had happened.

And yet Harry had only asked her to marry him the night before, and she had only refused!  Impossible to suppose that it was the mere plotting of the finished coquette.  This lover required neither teasing nor kindling.