"I'm afraid I can't tell you. But you seem to be going to have all you want now, so it is about time you ceased railing at your fate. I suppose if I were properly unselfish I should efface myself at once, and part from you in an affecting scene. But the people who make affecting scenes are apt to forget that they have got to meet again afterwards as ordinary actors in an ordinary play, and then the memory of the affecting scene makes them sheepish; so I prefer to tell you that I am merely and vulgarly angry with you for inviting me to make a fool of myself. Not that I envy that poor child upstairs either; she doesn't understand you a bit, and you will wound her half-a-dozen times a day. It is not my affair, however, and you will have to get through it together somehow; I wash my hands of you both." The musician said he thought they might manage it, perhaps; and Lady Joan pulled down the blind in eloquent silence, and rang the bell. He took the hint and held out his hand. "Good-night. You will come to breakfast?" "Since you say so; I always do what you tell me," he said, with truth. "No, you don't," she contradicted, "or you would never have cajoled me into saying I would marry you. If you had done what I told you to-day all this trouble would not have arisen. How brutally forgetful men are!" Which was hardly fair of her, he thought, as it was his distinct recollection that she had really ended in asking him to marry her, and had hardly waited for his assent to the proposal; if she had meant what she said in the castle meadow, and kept to it, there would have been no complications at all. And the musician finished his cigar in the orchard of the "Relton Arms," and came to the conclusion that Lady Joan with all her excellent qualities had an unpleasant amount of worldly wisdom and egoism in her composition, which he had never discovered until he had seen it contrasted with the womanly innocence of his dear little betrothed. "How brutally forgetful men are!" were the words that remained on the lips of the worldly wise woman all through that hot night in August. CHAPTER VII.