“Are you better--really better? Are you quite sure you have no cold left? Nothing to make your friends anxious about you?” (Agatha shook her head smilingly.) “That's right; I am so glad.” And no doubt Major Harper was; for a true kind-heartedness, softened even to tender-heartedness, was visible in his handsome face. Which face had been for twenty years the admiration of nearly every woman in every drawing-room he entered: a considerable trial for any man. Now and then some independent young lady, who had reasons of her own for preferring rosy complexions, turn-up noses, and “runaway” chins, might quarrel with the Major's fine Roman profile and jet-black moustache and hair; but--there was no denying it--he was, even at forty, a remarkably handsome man; one of the old school of Chesterfield perfection, which is fast dying out. Everybody liked him, more or less; and some people--a few men and not a few women, had either in friendship or in warmer fashion--deeply loved him. Society in general was quite aware of this; nor, it must be confessed, did Major Harper at all attempt to disprove or ignore the fact. He wore his honours--as he did a cross won, no one quite knew how, during a brief service in the Peninsula--neither pompously nor boastingly, but with the mild indifference of conscious desert. All this could be at once discerned in his face, voice, and manner; from which likewise a keen observer might draw the safe conclusion that, though a decided man of fashion, and something of a dandy, he was above either puppyism or immorality. And Agatha's rich Anglo-Indian father had not judged foolishly when he put his only child and her property in the trust of, as he believed, that rare personage, an honest man. If the girl Agatha, who took honesty as a matter of course in every gentleman, endowed this particular one with a few qualities more than he really possessed, it was an amiable weakness on her part, for which, as Major Harper would doubtless have said with a seriously troubled countenance, “no one could possibly blame _him._” In speaking of the Major we have taken little notice--as little, indeed, as Agatha did--of the younger Mr. Harper. “My brother, Miss Bowen. He came home when my sister Emily died.” The brief introduction terminated in a slight fall of voice, which made the young lady look sympathisingly at the handsome face that took shades of sadness as easily as shades of mirth. In her interest for the Major she merely bowed to his brother; just noticed that the stranger was a tall, fair “boy,” not at all resembling her own friend; and after a polite speech or two of welcome, to which Mr. Harper answered very briefly, she hardly looked at him again until she and her guests adjourned to the family drawing-room of Dr. Ianson.