She cut him short with terse candour.  ‘Yes,’ she said, ’a false report is in circulation.  I am not yet engaged to be married to any one, if that is your meaning.’

Ladywell looked cheerful at this frank answer, and said tentatively, ’Am I forgotten?’

‘No; you are exactly as you always were in my mind.’

’Then I have been cruelly deceived.  I was guided too much by appearances, and they were very delusive.  I am beyond measure glad I came here to-day.  I called at your house and learnt that you were here; and as I was going out of town, in any indefinite direction, I settled then to come this way.  What a happy idea it was!  To think of you now—­and I may be permitted to—­’

‘Assuredly you may not.  How many times I have told you that!’

‘But I do not wish for any formal engagement,’ said Ladywell quickly, fearing she might commit herself to some expression of positive denial, which he could never surmount.  ’I’ll wait—­I’ll wait any length of time.  Remember, you have never absolutely forbidden my—­friendship.  Will you delay your answer till some time hence, when you have thoroughly considered; since I fear it may be a hasty one now?’

‘Yes, indeed; it may be hasty.’

‘You will delay it?’

‘Yes.’

‘When shall it be?’

’Say a month hence.  I suggest that, because by that time you will have found an answer in your own mind:  strange things may happen before then.  “She shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them; then shall she say, I will go and return to my first”—­however, that’s no matter.’

‘What—­did you—?’ Ladywell began, altogether bewildered by this.

’It is a passage in Hosea which came to my mind, as possibly applicable to myself some day,’ she answered.  ‘It was mere impulse.’

’Ha-ha!—­a jest—­one of your romances broken loose.  There is no law for impulse:  that is why I am here.’

Thus fancifully they conversed till the interview concluded.  Getting her to promise that she would see him again, Ladywell retired to a sitting-room on the same landing, in which he had been writing letters before she came up.  Immediately upon this her aunt, who began to suspect that something peculiar was in the wind, came to tell her that Mr. Neigh had been inquiring for her again.

‘Send him in,’ said Ethelberta.

Neigh’s footsteps approached, and the well-known figure entered.  Ethelberta received him smilingly, for she was getting so used to awkward juxtapositions that she treated them quite as a natural situation.  She merely hoped that Ladywell would not hear them talking through the partition.

Neigh scarcely said anything as a beginning:  she knew his errand perfectly; and unaccountable as it was to her, the strange and unceremonious relationship between them, that had originated in the peculiar conditions of their first close meeting, was continued now as usual.