"Can I do nothing to help you? My mission is to those who are in any trouble; and, apart from that, I thought once that you looked upon me as a friend." There was a touch of human emotion in the last words which seemed to bring him closer to Enid than the earlier sentence could have done. "But I know you have no need of me," the Rector added sorrowfully; "you have so many friends." "I have not a friend in the world!" the girl broke out; and then she half hid her face with her transparently thin fingers, and tried to conceal the fact that she was weeping. "Not a friend, Miss Vane?" Mr. Evandale's tone betrayed complete bewilderment. "Whom would you call my friend?" said Enid, almost passionately. "Not a man like my poor uncle, duped, blinded, deceived by any one who chooses to cajole him? Not a woman like his wife, who hates me, and wants me out of the way lest I should claim a share of the estate? Oh, I know what I am saying--I know too well! I can trust neither of them--for he is weak and under her control, and she has never been a friend to me or mine. I do not know what to do or where to go for counsel." "I heard a rumor that you were engaged to marry Mr. Hubert Lepel," said the Rector gravely. "If that be true, he surely should be counted amongst your friends." "A man," said Enid, with bitterness of which he would not have thought her capable, "who cares for me less than the last new play or the latest _débutante_ at Her Majesty's! Should I call him a friend?" "It is not true then that you are engaged to him?" "I thought that I was," said Enid, still very bitterly. "He asked me to marry him; I thought that he loved me, and I--I consented. But my uncle has now withdrawn the half consent he gave. I am to be asked again, they tell me, when I am twenty. I am their chattel--a piece of goods to be given away and taken back. And then you ask me if I am happy, or if I call the man who treats me so lightly a friend!" "I see--I see. But matters may yet turn out better than you think. Mr. Lepel is probably only kept back by the General's uncertainty of action. I can quite conceive that it would put a man into a very awkward position." "I do not think that Hubert cares much," said Enid, with a little sarcasm in her tone. "He must care!" said Evandale impetuously. "Why?" the girl asked, suddenly turning her innocent eyes upon him in some surprise. "Why should he care?" The Rector's face glowed. "Because he--he must care." The answer was ridiculously inadequate, he knew, but he had nothing else to say. "How can he help caring when he sees that you care?--unless he has no more feeling than a log or a block of stone." He smote his hand angrily against the trunk of a tree beside him as he spoke. Still Enid looked at him with the same expression of amazement. But little by little his emotion seemed to affect her too--the blush to pass from his face to her pale cheeks.