‘It does not matter about paining me,’ said Neigh.  ’Don’t take that into consideration at all.  But I did not expect you to leave me so entirely without help—­to refuse me absolutely as far as words go—­after what you did.  If it had not been for that I should never have ventured to call.  I might otherwise have supposed your interest to be fixed in another quarter; but your acting in that manner encouraged me to think you could listen to a word.’

‘What do you allude to?’ said Ethelberta.  ‘How have I acted?’

Neigh appeared reluctant to go any further; but the allusion soon became sufficiently clear.  ’I wish my little place at Farnfield had been worthier of you,’ he said brusquely.  ’However, that’s a matter of time only.  It is useless to build a house there yet.  I wish I had known that you would be looking over it at that time of the evening.  A single word, when we were talking about it the other day, that you were going to be in the neighbourhood, would have been sufficient.  Nothing could have given me so much delight as to have driven you round.’

He knew that she had been to Farnfield:  that knowledge was what had inspired him to call upon her to-day!  Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson’s damn.  Her face did not change, since a face must be said not to change while it preserves the same pleasant lines in the mobile parts as before; but anybody who has preserved his pleasant lines under the half-minute’s peer of the invidious camera, and found what a wizened, starched kind of thing they stiffen to towards the end of the time, will understand the tendency of Ethelberta’s lovely features now.

‘Yes; I walked round,’ said Ethelberta faintly.

Neigh was decidedly master of the position at last; but he spoke as if he did not value that.  His knowledge had furnished him with grounds for calling upon her, and he hastened to undeceive her from supposing that he could think ill of any motive of hers which gave him those desirable grounds.

’I supposed you, by that, to give some little thought to me occasionally,’ he resumed, in the same slow and orderly tone.  ’How could I help thinking so?  It was your doing that which encouraged me.  Now, was it not natural—­I put it to you?’

Ethelberta was almost exasperated at perceiving the awful extent to which she had compromised herself with this man by her impulsive visit.  Lightly and philosophically as he seemed to take it—­as a thing, in short, which every woman would do by nature unless hindered by difficulties—­it was no trifle to her as long as he was ignorant of her justification; and this she determined that he should know at once, at all hazards.

’It was through you in the first place that I did look into your grounds!’ she said excitedly.  ’It was your presumption that caused me to go there.  I should not have thought of such a thing else.  If you had not said what you did say I never should have thought of you or Farnfield either—­Farnfield might have been in Kamtschatka for all I cared.’