A lady is one thing, and a girl of the class Dahlia had sprung from altogether another.  He could not help imagining the sort of appearance she would make there; and the thought even was a momentary clog upon his tongue.  How he used to despise these people!  Especially he had despised the young men as brainless cowards in regard to their views of women and conduct toward them.  All that was changed.  He fancied now that they, on the contrary, would despise him, if only they could be aware of the lingering sense he entertained of his being in bondage under a sacred obligation to a farmer’s daughter.

But he had one thing to discover, and that was, why Sir William had made it a peculiar request that he should come to meet him here.  Could the desire possibly be to reconcile him with Mrs. Lovell?  His common sense rejected the idea at once:  Sir William boasted of her wit and tact, and admired her beauty, but Edward remembered his having responded tacitly to his estimate of her character, and Sir William was not the man to court the alliance of his son with a woman like Mrs. Lovell.  He perceived that his father and the fair widow frequently took counsel together.  Edward laughed at the notion that the grave senior had himself become fascinated, but without utterly scouting it, until he found that the little lady whom he had led to dinner the first day, was an heiress; and from that, and other indications, he exactly divined the nature of his father’s provident wishes.  But this revelation rendered Mrs. Lovell’s behaviour yet more extraordinary.  Could it be credited that she was abetting Sir William’s schemes with all her woman’s craft?  “Has she,” thought Edward, “become so indifferent to me as to care for my welfare?” He determined to put her to the test.  He made love to Adeline Gosling.  Nothing that he did disturbed the impenetrable complacency of Mrs. Lovell.  She threw them together as she shuffled the guests.  She really seemed to him quite indifferent enough to care for his welfare.  It was a point in the mysterious ways of women, or of widows, that Edward’s experience had not yet come across.  All the parties immediately concerned were apparently so desperately acquiescing in his suit, that he soon grew uneasy.  Mrs. Lovell not only shuffled him into places with the raw heiress, but with the child’s mother; of whom he spoke to Algernon as of one too strongly breathing of matrimony to appease the cravings of an eclectic mind.

“Make the path clear for me, then,” said Algernon, “if you don’t like the girl.  Pitch her tales about me.  Say, I’ve got a lot in me, though I don’t let it out.  The game’s up between you and Peggy Lovell, that’s clear.  She don’t forgive you, my boy.”

“Ass!” muttered Edward, seeing by the light of his perception, that he was too thoroughly forgiven.