‘A charming one,’ said Lord Mountclere, smiling a half-minute smile, and making as if he would take his hat off and would not quite.  ’Perhaps we must not call it coincidence entirely,’ he continued; ’my journey, which I have contemplated for some time, was not fixed this week altogether without a thought of your presence on the road—­hee-hee!  Do you go far to-day?’

‘As far as Caen,’ said Ethelberta.

‘Ah!  That’s the end of my day’s journey, too,’ said Lord Mountclere.  They parted and took their respective places, Lord Mountclere choosing a compartment next to the one Ethelberta was entering, and not, as she had expected, attempting to join her.

Now she had instantly fancied when the viscount was speaking that there were signs of some departure from his former respectful manner towards her; and an enigma lay in that.  At their earlier meetings he had never ventured upon a distinct coupling of himself and herself as he had done in his broad compliment to-day—­if compliment it could be called.  She was not sure that he did not exceed his license in telling her deliberately that he had meant to hover near her in a private journey which she was taking without reference to him.  She did not object to the act, but to the avowal of the act; and, being as sensitive as a barometer on signs affecting her social condition, it darted upon Ethelberta for one little moment that he might possibly have heard a word or two about her being nothing more nor less than one of a tribe of thralls; hence his freedom of manner.  Certainly a plain remark of that sort was exactly what a susceptible peer might be supposed to say to a pretty woman of far inferior degree.  A rapid redness filled her face at the thought that he might have smiled upon her as upon a domestic whom he was disposed to chuck under the chin.  ‘But no,’ she said.  ’He would never have taken the trouble to follow and meet with me had he learnt to think me other than a lady.  It is extremity of devotion—­that’s all.’

It was not Ethelberta’s inexperience, but that her conception of self precluded such an association of ideas, which led her to dismiss the surmise that his attendance could be inspired by a motive beyond that of paying her legitimate attentions as a co-ordinate with him and his in the social field.  Even if he only meant flirtation, she read it as of that sort from which courtship with an eye to matrimony differs only in degree.  Hence, she thought, his interest in her was not likely, under the ordinary influences of caste feeling, to continue longer than while he was kept in ignorance of her consanguinity with a stock proscribed.  She sighed at the anticipated close of her full-feathered towering when her ties and bonds should be uncovered.  She might have seen matters in a different light, and sighed more.  But in the stir of the moment it escaped her thought that ignorance of her position, and a consequent regard for her as a woman of good standing, would have prevented his indulgence in any course which was open to the construction of being disrespectful.