"I have been wishing for an opportunity to speak to you, Miss Adair. There is a question that I--that I--should like to put to you. One I have very much at heart." It was coming. In spite of Ellen Adair's studied coldness, by which she had meant him to learn that he must not speak, she saw that it was coming. In the pause he made, as if he would wait for her permission to go on, she felt miserably uncomfortable. Her nature was essentially generous and sensitive; to have to refuse Mr. Seeley, or any one else, made her feel as humiliated as though she had committed a crime. And she could have esteemed the man apart from this. They were thus standing: Mr. Seeley looking awkward and nervous, Ellen turning red and white: when Arthur Bohun walked in. Mr. Seeley, effectually interrupted for the time, muttered a good-morning to Captain Bohun and went into the garden. "What was Seeley saying, Ellen?" "Nothing," she rather faintly answered. "_Nothing!_" Ellen glanced up at him. His face wore the haughty Bohun look; his mouth betrayed scorn enough for ten proud Bohuns put together. She did not answer. "If he was saying 'nothing,' why should you be looking as you did?--with a blush on your face, and your eyes cast down?" "He had really said as good as nothing, Arthur. What he might have been going to say, I--I don't know. He had only that moment come in." "As you please," coldly returned Arthur, walking into the garden in his turn. "If you do not think me worthy of your confidence, I have no more to say." The Bohun blood was bubbling up fiercely. Not doubting Ellen; not in resentment against her--at least only so in the moment's anger: but in indignation that Seeley, a common village practitioner, should dare to lift his profane eyes to Ellen Adair. Captain Bohun had suspected the man's hopes for some short time past; there is an instinct in these things; and he felt outrageous over it. Tom Graves's venture had filled him with resentment; but he at least was a gentleman and a man of position. Ellen, wonderfully disturbed, gently sat down to write again; all she did was gentle. And the diary had a few sentences added to it. "That senseless William Seeley! And after showing him as plainly as I could, that it is useless--that I should consider it an impertinence in him to attempt to speak to me. I don't know whether it was for the worst or the best that Arthur should have come in just at that moment. For the best because it stopped Mr. Seeley's nonsense; for the worst because Arthur has now seen and is vexed. The vexation will not last, for he knows better. Here they are."