“Mr. Stead will probably be down to-night, so that you need lose no time in beginning,” Brooke made answer, flushing hotly. “We four have been playing whist a good deal, lately, and as I am not passionately fond of it, you shall take my hand. I think that you and he will prove pretty evenly matched in most things. As to my farmer, as you absurdly call him, you had better leave him alone,—it’s not worth while,—he might misunderstand, take you in earnest, and embarrass you.” Whereupon, after making the most cutting speech that Lucy had ever heard from her tongue, she turned about and went quietly downstairs, saying something about hurrying supper, as Lucy must be hungry as well as tired. A new idea came to Lucy, born of her own teasing words, spoken wholly at random and in jest, and of Brooke’s flushing. She had always thought Brooke wholly an idealist in affairs of the heart, and that whatever emotion she had ever been able to detect had been brought out by the artist Lorenz during their Paris sojourn. When it had apparently ended in naught she had been both disappointed and glad, the latter especially after Adam Lawton’s failure, for after this she had desired Brooke, through matrimony, again to have the luxury and chance to enjoy her art that she thought her friend deserved. When Charlie Ashton had drawn her attention to the resemblance to Brooke in the picture, “Eucharistia,” she had expected developments, but now that nearly six months had passed she regarded the thing as a mere artistic coincidence, the lingering in the man’s memory, perhaps, of a face for which he doubtless had a passing fancy. Now a tangible possibility in the shape of Stead came into the foreground. Though Lucy had not seen the man, the Cub had given him a glowing recommendation. As to his age,—Lucy was a woman of experience,—fifty might mean many things, fatherly or otherwise, and the life of leisure he led implied that he had some independent property. Was he not always much at the house, and were not his books and various offerings scattered about everywhere, even at her first visit? Brooke had written of horseback rides in his company. Surely he did not come alone out of respect for Mrs. Lawton or anxiety about the Cub’s lessons. Why had Brooke blushed and been so resentful?