An idle fear, which Lady Marabout dismissed contemptuously from her mind when she saw how entirely Goodwood--in defiance of the Hauttons' sneer, the drowsy Duchess's unconcealed frown, all the comments sure to be excited in feminine minds, and all the chaff likely to be elicited from masculine lips at the mess-table, and in the U. S., and in the Guards' box before the curtain went up for the ballet--vowed himself to the service of the little detrimental throughout that morning party, and spoke a temporary adieu, whose tenderness, if she did not exactly catch, Lady Marabout could at least construe, as he pulled up the tiger-skin over Flora's dainty dress, before the Marabout carriage rolled down the Fulham Road to town. At which tenderness of farewell Carruthers--steeled to all such weaknesses himself--gave a disdainful glance and a contemptuous twist of his moustaches, as he stood by the door talking to his mother. "You too, Phil?" said Goodwood, with a laugh, as the carriage rolled away. Carruthers stared at him haughtily, as he will stare at his best friends if they touch his private concerns more nearly than he likes; a stare which said disdainfully, "I don't understand you," and thereby told the only lie to which Carruthers ever stooped in the whole course of his existence. Goodwood laughed again. "If you poach on my manor _here_, I shall kill you Phil; so _gare à vous_!" "You are in an enigmatical mood to-day! I can't say I see much wit in your riddles," said Carruthers, with his grandest and most contemptuous air, as he lit his Havana. "Confound that fellow! I'd rather have had any other man in London for a rival! Twenty and more years ago how he cut me out with that handsome Virginie Peauderose, that we were both such mad boys after in Paris. However, it will be odd if _I_ can't win the day here. A Goodwood rejected--pooh! There isn't a woman in England that would do it!" thought Goodwood, as he drove down the Fulham Road. "'_His_ manor!' Who's told him it's his? And if it be, what is that to me?" thought Carruthers, as he got into his tilbury. "Philip, _you_'re not a fool, like the rest of them, I hope? You've not forsworn yourself surely? Pshaw!--nonsense!--impossible!" "Certainly she _has_ something very charming about her. If I were a man I don't think I could resist her," thought Lady Marabout, as she sat in her box in the grand tier, tenth from the Queen's, moving her fan slowly, lifting her lorgnon now and then, listening vaguely to the music of the second act of the "Barbiere," for probably about the two hundredth time in her life, and looking at Flora Moutolieu, sitting opposite to her.