'She refused Jerningham, of ours, who was foolish enough to propose in the first flush of her widowhood, and she refused Jack Rakes of the Coldstreams last month, and sent him off to the Continent to console himself,' Desmond was saying; 'she has vowed, they say, that she would never, never marry, after the death of that fellow in the line--what's his name?--Beverley, don't you know, and here I find her billing and cooing most picturesquely in an arbour! It is right good fun, by Jove! I only wonder who the party is that was receiving "the outpouring of an enamoured heart, secluded in moral widowhood;" and I might have discovered, if I had only pretended to blunder into the arbour; but then I hate to make a scene, and it's deuced bad form to spoil sport.' Vane felt it in his heart to knock the laughing plunger down, when hearing him run on thus. It began to seem painfully evident that all this episode could not be falsification. Major Desmond had no particular interest in Ida, though piqued, as much as it was in his lazy nature to be, at Clare, for refusing the lounging offer he had made her. For the other he had neither liking nor disliking; but, in all he told Vane, he seemed inspired only by that love of gossipy chit-chat in which even men of the best position will indulge by the hour at their club or elsewhere, together, perhaps, with the desire, so invariable, to quiz the grief of a widow, especially if she is young and handsome. 'There is,' says a writer, 'no weakness of which men are so ashamed of being convicted as credulity, and there is none so natural to an honest nature.' But to the storm that gathered in the honest heart of Jerry were added rage, astonishment, and an overwhelming sense of utter disappointment. Where had this unknown come from, and whither did he go? Where had she met him, and how long had this mysterious, and, to all appearance, secret intimacy lasted? What manner of man was he, that she was ashamed to have him introduced to her family? He had heard--he had certainly _read_--of ladies, even of the highest, most delicate nurture and tender culture, by some madness, inversion of the mind, or by temptation of the devil, taking wild fancies for valets and grooms, and even marrying them in secret, and thus at times all manner of horrible speculations crowded into the now giddy brain of Jerry. Ida! wildly as he loved her he would rather she were dead than less or not what he supposed and believed her to be; but he thought bitterly, 'Alas! where was there ever man or woman who reached the spiritualised standard of idealistic love?' So, in spite of himself--it was not in human nature that it could be otherwise--his old jealousy, that barbarous yet just leaven which he had felt in the past time, when she preferred Jack Beverley to himself, grew in his heart again.