’Have you been able to bestow a thought on the question between us?  I hope so,’ said Neigh.

‘It is no use,’ said Ethelberta.  ’Wait a month, and you will not require an answer.  You will not mind speaking low, because of a person in the next room?’

‘Not at all.—­Why will that be?’

‘I might say; but let us speak of something else.’

‘I don’t see how we can,’ said Neigh brusquely.  ’I had no other reason on earth for calling here.  I wished to get the matter settled, and I could not be satisfied without seeing you.  I hate writing on matters of this sort.  In fact I can’t do it, and that’s why I am here.’

He was still speaking when an attendant entered with a note.

‘Will you excuse me one moment?’ said Ethelberta, stepping to the window and opening the missive.  It contained these words only, in a scrawl so full of deformities that she could hardly piece its meaning together:—­

’I must see you again to-day unless you absolutely deny yourself to me, which I shall take as a refusal to meet me any more.  I will arrive, punctually, five minutes after you receive this note.  Do pray be alone if you can, and eternally gratify,—­Yours,

   ‘Mountclere.’

‘If anything has happened I shall be pleased to wait,’ said Neigh, seeing her concern when she had closed the note.

‘O no, it is nothing,’ said Ethelberta precipitately.  ’Yet I think I will ask you to wait,’ she added, not liking to dismiss Neigh in a hurry; for she was not insensible to his perseverance in seeking her over all these miles of sea and land; and secondly, she feared that if he were to leave on the instant he might run into the arms of Lord Mountclere and Ladywell.

‘I shall be only too happy to stay till you are at leisure,’ said Neigh, in the unimpassioned delivery he used whether his meaning were a trite compliment or the expression of his most earnest feeling.

‘I may be rather a long time,’ said Ethelberta dubiously.

‘My time is yours.’

Ethelberta left the room and hurried to her aunt, exclaiming, ’O, Aunt Charlotte, I hope you have rooms enough to spare for my visitors, for they are like the fox, the goose, and the corn, in the riddle; I cannot leave them together, and I can only be with one at a time.  I want the nicest drawing-room you have for an interview of a bare two minutes with an old gentleman.  I am so sorry this has happened, but it is not altogether my fault!  I only arranged to see one of them; but the other was sent to me by mother, in a mistake, and the third met with me on my journey:  that’s the explanation.  There’s the oldest of them just come.’

She looked through the glass partition, and under the arch of the court-gate, as the wheels of the viscount’s carriage were heard outside.  Ethelberta ascended to a room on the first floor, Lord Mountclere was shown up, and the door closed upon them.