and old Vernon wooing!  Picture the scene to yourself, my love.  His notion of wooing.  I suspect, will be to treat the lady like a lexicon, and turn over the leaves for the word, and fly through the leaves for another word, and so get a sentence.  Don’t frown at the poor old fellow, my Clara; some have the language on their tongues, and some have not.  Some are very dry sticks; manly men, honest fellows, but so cut away, so polished away from the sex, that they are in absolute want of outsiders to supply the silken filaments to attach them.  Actually!” Sir Willoughby laughed in Clara’s face to relax the dreamy stoniness of her look.  “But I can assure you, my dearest, I have seen it.  Vernon does not know how to speak—­as we speak.  He has, or he had, what is called a sneaking affection for Miss Dale.  It was the most amusing thing possible; his courtship!—­the air of a dog with an uneasy conscience, trying to reconcile himself with his master!  We were all in fits of laughter.  Of course it came to nothing.”

“Will Mr. Whitford,” said Clara, “offend you to extinction if he declines?”

Willoughby breathed an affectionate “Tush!” to her silliness.

“We bring them together, as we best can.  You see, Clara, I desire, and I will make some sacrifices to detain him.”

“But what do you sacrifice?—­a cottage?” said Clara, combative at all points.

“An ideal, perhaps.  I lay no stress on sacrifice.  I strongly object to separations.  And therefore, you will say, I prepare the ground for unions?  Put your influence to good service, my love.  I believe you could persuade him to give us the Highland fling on the drawing-room table.”

“There is nothing to say to him of Crossjay?”

“We hold Crossjay in reserve.”

“It is urgent.”

“Trust me.  I have my ideas.  I am not idle.  That boy bids fair for a capital horseman.  Eventualities might . . .”  Sir Willoughby murmured to himself, and addressing his bride, “The cavalry?  If we put him into the cavalry, we might make a gentleman of him—­not be ashamed of him.  Or, under certain eventualities, the Guards.  Think it over, my love.  De Craye, who will, I suppose, act best man for me, supposing old Vernon to pull at the collar, is a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Guards, a thorough gentleman—­of the brainless class, if you like, but an elegant fellow; an Irishman; you will see him, and I should like to set a naval lieutenant beside him in a drawingroom, for you to compare them and consider the model you would choose for a boy you are interested in.  Horace is grace and gallantry incarnate; fatuous, probably:  I have always been too friendly with him to examine closely.  He made himself one of my dogs, though my elder, and seemed to like to be at my heels.  One of the few men’s faces I can call admirably handsome;—­with nothing behind it, perhaps.  As Vernon says, ’a nothing picked by the vultures and bleached by the desert’.  Not a bad talker, if you are satisfied with keeping up the ball.  He will amuse you.  Old Horace does not know how amusing he is!”