He distrusted Lassigny. Why? She had never admitted the question before, and only did so now on the first breath of discomfort that blew chill on her own heart. Those two sorts of love of which Mollie's lover had dimly seen his own to be compounded--had they both been offered to her? There had been no such shrinking on Lassigny's part as the more ordinary young man had confessed to. He had wooed her boldly, irresistibly, with the sure confidence of a man who knows his power, and what he may expect to get for himself from it. He had desired her, and she had fallen a willing captive to him. She knew that he had found her very sweet, and he had laid at her feet so much that she had never questioned his having laid all. All would have included his own man's past, the full tide of the years and experiences of youth, spent lavishly while she had been a little child, and beginning now to poise its wings for departure. It was the careless waste of youth and of love that Mollie's lover had felt to have been disloyalty to the finer love that had come to him, and turned him from his loud self-confidence to diffidence and doubt. There had been no self-abasement of that sort in Beatrix's lover. He had claimed her triumphantly, as he had claimed and enjoyed other loves. She was one of a series, different from the others insomuch as the time had come for him to settle down, as the phrase went, and it was more agreeable to make a start at that postponed process with love as part of the propulsion than without it. It was not even certain that she would be the last of the series. In her father's view it was almost certain that she wouldn't. She did not see all of this, by any means, as she rode reflectively homewards. Her knowledge and experience included perhaps a very small part of it as conscious reflection, and there was no ordered sequence of thought or discovery in the workings of her girl's mind. Some progression, however, there was, in little spurts of feeling and enlightenment. She was more doubtful of her lover, more doubtful of the strength of her own attachment to him, more inclined to return to her loving allegiance to her father, whatever the future should hold for her. This last impulse of affection was the most significant outcome of all her aroused sensibilities. She would not at any time have acknowledged that he had been right and she had been wrong. But she felt the channel of her love for him cleared of obstruction. It flowed towards him. It would be good to give it expression, and gain in return the old happy signs of his tenderness and devotion towards her. She wanted to see him at once, and behave to him as his spoilt loving child, and rather hoped that the fortunes of the chase would bring him home before the rest, so that she might have a cosy companionable little time with him alone.