‘Oh, not long; about six weeks. He was home for his holidays one summer, and we were talking together in front of the house. Miss Strangforth’s carriage, with her and Magdalen in it, drove by. The old lady saw us bowing, and stopped. I introduced Michael; he fell in love on the spot, then and there, over head and ears. Martha asked him to drive with them, and he drove. Drove deeper and deeper into love, I suppose; and—yes, it was just six weeks later, they were together at a picnic to Cauldron, and they returned engaged. My father has never got over it.’ ‘How?’ asked Otho, in the same strangled voice. ‘He thought it so idiotic and imprudent. And so it was, and is. But Michael had become a man over the doing of it. They stuck to it, and they have stuck to it ever since. Some day, I suppose they will be married; but I don’t know when.’ Otho made absolutely no reply to this prophecy. They turned in at the Thorsgarth gates, and the subject was dropped. But Gilbert knew now why Otho had given them his company at dinner, and why he himself had been so earnestly pressed to go back to Thorsgarth after their walk. CHAPTER IV THE FACULTY OF CLOSE OBSERVATION One night, during the winter which followed the conversation between Otho and Gilbert, a large ball was given at a well-known house in the neighbourhood of Bradstane, and present at it were both the Langstroth brothers, Magdalen Wynter, and even Otho Askam, little as he loved such entertainments. Perhaps Gilbert had persuaded him to go. Magdalen was chaperoned by a good-natured matron, who had married off all her own girls with credit and renown, and could therefore afford to witness with complacent amusement the gaspings and stugglings of those who were still, as Otho might elegantly have put it, ‘in the running.’ She had not that dislike to Magdalen which animated more interested persons; she admired her beauty, and considered her ‘good form.’ Magdalen herself had never looked better than she did that night, or more haughtily and superbly independent of all outside support. She was richly attired, for Miss Strangforth liked her niece to dress splendidly. She danced very seldom; it had never been her habit to do so often; and as not even her rivals, while in possession of their senses, would have dreamed of saying that this was because she could not get partners, and as her sitting out usually involved also the sitting out of some man who would otherwise have been free to dance with another girl, and as the said men always looked perfectly happy and satisfied in their inactivity at such times,—her habit did not in any way make her more popular.