But somehow when his next letter to the lady of his love came to be written he was in a lazy mood, and did not mention Daphne. The subject, to be interesting, required to be treated in detail, and he did not feel himself equal to the task. ‘Isn’t he nice?’ asked Daphne, when the unknown had departed. ‘He is very gentlemanlike,’ assented Martha, ‘but still I feel we are doing wrong in encouraging him.’ ‘Encouraging him!’ echoed her schoolfellow. ‘You talk as if he were a stray cur that had followed us.’ ‘You perfectly well know what I mean, Daphne. It cannot be right to get acquainted with a strange gentleman as we have done. I wouldn’t have mamma or Jane know of it for the world.’ ‘Then don’t tell them,’ said Daphne, yawning listlessly, and opening her rosy palm for a nondescript green insect to crawl over it. ‘But it seems such a want of candour,’ objected Martha. ‘Then tell them, and defy them. But whatever you do, don’t be fussy, you dear good-natured old Martha; for of all things fussiness is the most detestable in hot weather. As for Mr. Nero, he will be off and away across the Jura before to-morrow night, I daresay, and he will forget us, and we shall forget him, and the thing will be all over and done with. I wish he would bring us our luncheon. I’m hungry.’ ‘I feel rather faint,’ admitted Martha, who thought it ungenteel to confess absolute hunger. ‘That bread we get for breakfast is all sponginess. Shall you tell your sister about Mr. Nero?’ ‘That depends. I may, perhaps, if I should be hard up for something to say to her.’ ‘Don’t you think she would be angry?’ ‘She never is angry. She is all sweetness and goodness, and belief in other people. I have spent very little of my life with her, or I should be ever so much better than I am. I should have grown up like her perhaps—or just a little like her, for I’m afraid the clay is different—if my father would have let me be brought up at home.’ ‘And he wouldn’t?’ asked Martha. She had heard her friend’s history very often, or as much of it as Daphne cared to tell, but she was always interested in the subject, and encouraged her schoolfellow’s egotism. Daphne’s people belonged to a world which Miss Dibb could never hope to enter; though perhaps Daphne’s father, Sir Vernon Lawford, had no larger income than Mr. Dibb, whose furniture and general surroundings were the best and most gorgeous that money could buy.