There was never any questioning Martha's decision; so Aura went back to the drawing-room doubtfully. It was a glorious day and Ned Blackborough had come over half-an-hour before, bearing both to herself and her grandfather notes of invitation from Mrs. Tressilian to come over to lunch and see the show place. The notes had evidently been all in order, for though her grandfather had declined brusquely for himself, he had looked at her as if he had just realised she was no longer a child, and asked her wistfully if she would like to go. And she without a thought had told the truth--namely that she would love it. Then had come doubts. The last three days, filled up as they had been by the absolute adulation of the two young men had brought her a curious, innate, but till then dormant, sense that there were things which girls ought not to do. And having, much against her will, admitted this to herself, she became sternly scrupulous. Ought she, or ought she not to go alone with Lord Blackborough in the motor? She knitted her brows over the problem, telling herself the while that she hated the world and every one in it. Then Lord Blackborough--he had an uncomfortable habit of reading her thoughts which she bitterly resented--had suggested Martha. And now Martha would not come. It was all such silly nonsense! Ned Blackborough, watching her troubled face, felt that he could then and there have put his arms round her, kissed her even against her will and carried her right away from everything and everybody; from all conventionalities and princes and powers. She was a perpetual temptation to him to cast aside what few moorings he had. He was a man and she the one and only woman in the whole wide world; and he wanted her. It was a headlong, purely emotional desire from which--curiously enough it struck him--passion was almost entirely absent. In a way, despite his greater reserve, there was more of passion in Ted's rational, straightforward, more normal love. The very emotionality of Ned's feeling, however, carried with it content and certainty; for he felt that nothing in heaven or earth could dim the halo of flame and fire in which he stood beside her. So he could afford to be magnanimous. "Then you had better take the fourth seat, Ted!" he said carelessly, looking to where the latter, his hands in his pockets, was glooming out of the window at the motor which could just be seen waiting through the bare branches across the drawbridge. He had already had a casual invitation for himself and his cycle thrown at him, he felt, like a bone to a dog. But he had refused it. Pleasant work, indeed, riding in the dusty wake of a rival who was abducting the girl you loved at the rate of five-and-twenty miles an hour in a Panhard.