“The reproof is just,” he said. “You are quite right. I have made a blunder; there is no mistake about it.” “But do you think it was fair,” she said with some spirit--“do you think it was fair to believe all this harm about a woman you had never seen? Now, listen. A hundred times I have begged Mr. Lavender to be more attentive to his wife--not in these words, of course, but as directly as I could. Mamma has given parties, made arrangements for visits, drives and all sorts of things, to tempt Mrs. Lavender to come to us, and all in vain. Of course you can’t thrust yourself on any one like that. Though mamma and myself like Mrs. Lavender very well, it is asking too much that we should encounter the humiliation of intermeddling.” Here she stopped suddenly, with the least show of embarrassment. Then she said, frankly, “You are an old friend of hers. It is very good of you to have risked so much for the sake of that girl. There are very few gentlemen whom one meets who would do as much.” Ingram could say nothing, and was a little impatient with himself. Was he to be first reproved, and then treated with an indulgent kindness by a mere girl? “Mamma,” said Mrs. Lorraine, as an elderly lady entered the room, “let me introduce you to Mr. Ingram, whom you must already know. He proposes we should join in some conspiracy to inveigle Mrs. Lavender into society, and make the poor little thing amuse herself.” “Little!” said Mrs. Kavanagh, with a smile; “she is a good deal taller than you are, my dear. But I am afraid, Mr. Ingram, you have undertaken a hopeless task. Will you stay to luncheon and talk it over with us?” “I hope you will,” said Mrs. Lorraine; and naturally enough he consented. Luncheon was just ready. As they were going into the room on the opposite side of the hall, the younger lady said to Ingram in a quiet undertone, but with much indifference of manner, “You know, if you think I ought to give up Mr. Lavender’s acquaintance altogether, I will do so at once. But perhaps that will not be necessary.” So this was the house in which Sheila’s husband spent so much of his time, and these were the two ladies of whom so much had been said and surmised? There were three of Lavender’s pictures on the walls of the dining-room, and as Ingram inadvertently glanced at them, Mrs. Lorraine said to him, “Don’t you think it is a pity Mr. Lavender should continue drawing those imaginative sketches of heads? I do not think, myself, that he does himself justice in that way. Some bits of landscape, now, that I have seen, seemed to me to have quite a definite character about them, and promised far more than anything else of his I have seen.” “That is precisely what I think,” said Ingram, partly amused and partly annoyed to find that this girl, with her clear gray eyes, her soft and musical voice, and her singular delicacy of manner, had an evil trick of saying the very things he would himself have said, and leaving him with nothing but a helpless “Yes.”