the engagement he declared that he knew nothing about it,—­except that he had given his consent if the settlements were all right.  Lady Augustus managed all that.  Morton had then said that under those circumstances he feared he must regard the honour which he had hoped to enjoy as being beyond his reach.  Lord Augustus had shrugged his shoulders and had gone back to his whist, this interview having taken place in the strangers’ room of his club.  That Lord Rufford was also going to Mistletoe he heard from young Glossop at the Foreign Office.  It was quite possible that Glossop had been instructed to make this known to Morton by his sister Lady Penwether.  Then Morton declared that the thing was over and that he would trouble himself no more about it.  But this resolution did not make him at all contented, and in his misery he went again down to his solitude at Bragton.

And now when he might fairly consider himself to be free, and when he should surely have congratulated himself on a most lucky escape from the great danger into which he had fallen, his love and admiration for the girl returned to him in a most wonderful manner.  He thought of her beauty and her grace, and the manner in which she would sit at the head of his table when the time should come for him to be promoted to some great capital.  To him she had fascinations which the reader, who perhaps knows her better than he ever did, will not share.  He could forgive the coldness of her conduct to himself—­he himself not being by nature demonstrative or impassioned,—­if only she were not more kind to any rival.  It was the fact that she should be visiting at the same house with Lord Rufford after what he had seen at Rufford Hall which had angered him.  But now in his solitude he thought that he might have been wrong at Rufford Hall.  If it were the case that the girl feared that her marriage might be prevented by the operations of lawyers and family friends, of course she would be right not to throw herself into his arms,—­even metaphorically.  He was a cold, just man who, when he had loved, could not easily get rid of his love, and now he would ask himself whether he was not hard upon the girl.  It was natural that she should be at Mistletoe; but then why should Lord Rufford be there with her?

His prospects at Patagonia did not console him much.  No doubt it was a handsome mission for a man of his age and there were sundry Patagonian questions of importance at the present moment which would give him a certain weight.  Patagonia was repudiating a loan, and it was hoped that he might induce a better feeling in the Patagonian Parliament.  There was the Patagonian railway for joining the Straits to the Cape the details of which he was now studying with great diligence.  And then there was the vital question of boundary between Patagonia and the Argentine Republic by settling which, should he be happy enough to succeed in doing so, he would prevent the horrors of warfare.  He endeavoured to fix his mind with