And the other Lord Quorn, he who had, so to speak, bought a title without a title, was, except so far as nourishment went, in an almost equally uncomfortable position. He had vowed that he would get up (his chill having left him) and he had done so, much to Peckover's annoyance and apprehension. That astute person, rendered yet more wily by the chance of losing a handsome income, and furthermore of being kicked out of the fairly safe asylum he had found in the Towers, had set himself, with all the desperate disingenuousness he could summon to his aid, to work upon the fears and personal considerations of the convalescent. The consequence was that Gage, obstinate as he was, so far succumbed to the lurid picture, drawn by his friend, of the certain consequences of showing himself, that he had to submit with a very ill grace to confining his perambulations to the more secluded parts of the house and garden. He would not have minded this so much had his circumscribed existence been mitigated by the charm of constant--or even inconstant--female society. But the fact was that so long as the rich Mr. Gage, represented by the strategic Peckover, was more or less free, Lord Quorn, even with a fair income, the result of his performance in the lake, was, to these ladies at least, less to be desired than the man of wealth. The Misses Hemyock were too familiar with an aristocratic position for it to have any charms for them. They were also well versed in the tricks of keeping up appearances on limited means, which meant going in for the parade and going without the desirables of life; in consequence of which their discontented hearts were both rigidly set upon solid fortune rather than upon empty grandeur; money was what they hankered after; they were tired of mere social standing. So Mr. Gage's yearning was still ungratified, and so he told himself, and his friend, Peckover, in no measured terms as he rampaged about the more secluded quarters of the demesne. Meanwhile the time for the Hemyocks to give up their tenancy of Staplewick had arrived, and that designing family had left the Towers. Not to go far, though. Lady Agatha with an eye to bringing the business in hand to a happy conclusion, had persuaded some acquaintances, two elderly sisters, to turn out of the Moat, a house within half a mile of the Towers, and seek the invigorating air of a seaside resort for a month or two. From this point of vantage she continued to keep an opportunist's eye on the eligible bachelors, whose position of comparative freedom was now from the lady's point of view that of a bird who is let out of its cage and allowed to hop and flutter to the extent permitted by the string attached to its legs. But the Moat and the _Three Pigeons_, where the enterprising Leos still lingered in an attitude of doubtfully restrained aggressiveness, were both marked with a red cross in the minds of Peckover and Gage, to be given a wide berth in their rambles.