To sit down in your morning clothes, painfully conscious of a blue tie with a pin it, at a decorous dinner-table with three men in correct evening dress, and two ladies--not indeed bare-shouldered according to ancient use, but yet arrayed in all the niceties of that demi-toilette which is the despair of the vulgar--is in itself no small trial to a sensitive and thin-skinned youth. Roger Burchell had not been able to resist the spell which Mrs. Meredith exercised upon everybody who came near her, nor had he been able to count the cost of that evening spent in Cara’s society, and to strike a balance between the pain it would cause him and the pleasure to be procured from it. He was not calm enough to do this. He had not thought of any pain involved, but snatched at the chance of carrying out his hopes and spending the evening in her society without thinking of any results. To be sure, instinctive dislike and repugnance had moved him at the first sight of the two young men. What did they want here? What had Cara to do with them? But that was all; and he had not realised how hard it would be to sit by and see these natural enemies so much nearer and more intimate with Cara than himself, linked to her by ties even of older friendship than he could boast of, poor fellow. All this was unthought-of misery. It was true that after the Merediths went away in the short interval before dinner he had half-an-hour with Cara by herself--but she asked him questions about his aunt and about his little sisters, showing no interest in himself, and at last begged him to excuse her, as she must get ready for dinner. Even then he did not know how dark his fate was to be; but he could not get ready for dinner. He looked at himself in the glass, and at his blue tie which he had thought so well of in the morning. The best that anyone could say for poor Roger was that he looked like a respectable mechanic in his Sunday costume, and a consciousness of this fact impressed itself upon his own mind for the first time. Yes--the long glass in the glimmering half-lighted drawing-room showed him his own image as no glass at home had ever done--like an engineer in his Sunday clothes, one of his practical ‘mates’ in the workshop, who showed him how to make boilers and screws, and asked him for beer--exactly like one of them. While this latter thought was in his mind, Cara came softly into the room in her white dress, the most perfect dainty creature, tearing poor Roger’s heart in two. How unlike she was to himself in his blue tie! he felt as if he could never leave her, and yet wished himself with his aunt in Notting Hill; for what had he to do here?