“Dear sir Morton,—­I quite forgot to tell you, when you and your friends dined with me the other day, that I am leaving home immediately and shall be away for the rest of the summer.  Lady Wicketts and Miss Fosby are staying on at the Manor for a fortnight or three weeks, as the country air does them so much good.  It will be very kind if you and Lord Roxmouth will call and see them as often as you can,—­they are such dear kind people!—­and I am sure Miss Tabitha will be glad to have them near her as she already likes them so much.  Anything you can do to give them pleasure while they are here, will be esteemed as a personal favour to myself.  I am sorry not to have the time to call and say good-bye—­but I am sure you will excuse ceremony.  I shall have left before you receive this note.—­With kind regards, sincerely yours,”
          
                                     “Maryllia Vancourt.”

Roxmouth read this letter, first to himself, and then aloud to all at table.  For a moment there was a silence of absolute stupefaction.

“Then she’s gone!” at last said Miss Tabitha, placidly nodding, while the suspicion of a malign smile crept round the hard corners of her mouth.

“Evidently!” And Roxmouth crumbled the bread beside his plate into fine shreds with a nervous, not to say vicious clench of his hand.

He was inwardly furious.  There is nothing so irritating to a man of his type as to be made ridiculous.  Maryllia had done this.  In the most trifling, casual, and ordinary way she had compelled him to look like a fool.  All his carefully laid plans were completely upset, and he fancied that even Longford, his tool, to whom he had freely confided his wishes and intentions, was secretly laughing at him.  To have plotted and contrived a stay at Badsworth Hall with the blusterous Pippitt in order to have the opportunity of crossing Maryllia’s path at every turn, and compromising her name with his in her own house and county, and then to find himself ‘left,’ with the civil suggestion that he should ‘call and see’ the antique Sisters Gemini, Lady Wicketts and Miss Fosby, was somewhat too much for his patience.  The blow was totally unexpected,—­the open slight to his amour propre sudden and keen.  His very blood tingled under the lash of Maryllia’s disdain—­she had carried a point against him, and he almost imagined he could hear the distant echo of her light mocking laughter.  His brow reddened,—­he gnawed his under-lip angrily, and sat mute, aware that he had been tricked and foiled.

Longford watched him narrowly and with something of dismay,—­for if this lordly patron, who, by his position alone, was able to push things on in certain quarters of the press, were to suddenly turn crusty and unreasonable, where would his, Longford’s, ’great literary light’ be?  Quenched utterly like a rush-light in a gale!  Sir Morton Pippitt during the uncomfortable pause of silence had