‘Michael is my lover—he does love me, too. He is the only friend I have, for no one is fond of me. If they were kind to me, and really cared for me, I would not take their Otho Askam away from them. I wonder if they know what he is, this creature that they make such a fuss about! Perhaps there would be no fuss if he were dancing attendance on any one but me—fuss, of course there would be no fuss. Gilbert and I know what he is. He has not been able to conceal his miserableness from us. And we know that he himself—the man—is not worth fighting for. But I do not mean to let them have him, all the same. It amuses me to keep him, and to enrage them. And I shall go on amusing myself in that way. Michael is very good, but he is not—amusing. If I were married to him, I wonder if I should find it as dull as I do being engaged to him. Surely not. But——’ Here Miss Strangforth’s maid came in, and said her mistress was awake, and was going to have a cup of tea, and would be glad if Miss Wynter would go to her. Magdalen went instantly, and whatever the state of her own heart, she did not let her great-aunt feel dull while she sat with her. CHAPTER V GILBERT’S CAUTIOUSNESS As the young men rode homewards, Michael again expressed his pleasure at Gilbert’s visit to Balder Hall. Gilbert, for his part, was meditative and rather silent during the first part of their ride, but was presently roused into animation by a remark of Michael’s. Some days before, Gilbert had been expounding to Michael, as he was now and then in the habit of doing, just so much as he thought fit for him to know of his financial arrangements and schemes for the future. He had informed his brother that the estate was being very gradually retrieved, that he, Gilbert, began to see daylight—a first glimmer, through the obscurity. All his plans, he said, were working well, except one, which, if he could only accomplish it, would give an impetus to everything else, and shorten his work by years; and that one was, of course, the sale or letting of the Townend factories. He could not sell them: he could not find any capitalist to work them. Gilbert had been very much in earnest when he spoke—in his way of being in earnest, that is, not vehemently, but gently. He spoke of the mills, even of the trouble they gave him, with respect—a respect which he would have accorded to no other topic or kind of topic under the sun. Consequently, it had jarred on his mood when Michael, lightly flicking his boot with his riding-whip (for he had looked in at the Red Gables on his way from his daily round), and glancing round the room as he spoke with an absent look, asked— ‘Then, have we no capital now?’ Gilbert looked at him, almost sharply at first, and then with a patient expression, like that of a conscientious teacher trying to instil some branch of knowledge into a peculiarly dense pupil.