Then Mr. Dalrymple had the faculty to perceive what made her look at him with so peculiarly wistful and earnest a look; he recognised his friend, if not his love and mate, in the earliest hours of their acquaintance. A friend in so fair a shape was doubly a friend naturally; and the strong appetite that he had for friendship, as a rudimental phase of passion, had had little to feed on but bitter memories for more than a dozen years. As for Rachel, it was almost inevitable that she should lose her heart to this hero of romance--this Paladin with a touch of the demon in him--whom circumstances combined to present to her under such singularly impressive auspices. If the truth must be told, she fell in love much more suddenly and hopelessly than he did; and the fates--incarnate in the persons of his enemies--did their best to precipitate the catastrophe. On the morning following their strange interview in the conservatory--of which she had been dreaming all night--she awoke with a dim sense of something being wrong. It was so very dim a sense that she did not consciously apprehend it, and therefore made no investigation into its origin. But instead of jumping out of bed as usual, eager to plunge at once into the unknown joys of a new day, she lay still until obliged to get up to receive her tea, and gazed pensively into vacancy. It was just such a morning as yesterday--the sun shining in through the white blind, the fresh wind rustling along the leafy verandahs, the magpies gossiping cheerily in great flocks about the garden; and there was that sweetest baby cooing like a little wood pigeon as he was carried past her door in his nurse's arms. But she was deaf to these erewhile potent influences. "Your hot water, miss," quoth a housemaid in the passage. "Thank you, Susan," she responded absently, and continued to gaze into vacancy. "Your tea, miss," came, with another tap, presently. And then it was she had to get out of bed. She took in her tea, set it down on a chair and forgot it; she put on her slippers and dressing-gown, and armed herself with towel and sponge, but had to make three visits to the bath-room before she could get in. Then she woke up to the fact that she was late, and scampered excitedly about the room in her anxiety to make a becoming toilet in the shortest possible space of time. Finally, she went to breakfast five minutes after the gong was supposed to have assembled the family, and found that the gentlemen had all gone out early on a shooting expedition. "Isn't it too bad?" exclaimed Miss Hale. "They arranged it in the smoking-room last night, after we were gone to bed; and Harold _knew_ that we wanted to play croquet." Croquet, it may be remarked, had not yet "gone out," and Harold was Mr. Lessel.