Her visits to Omega Street were not entirely devoted to _tete-a-tetes_ with her father. By reason of those coincidences which are so common to the lives of some people, it generally happened that M. Lenoble dropped in upon his invalid friend on the very day of Miss Paget's visit. M. Lenoble was in London on business, and this business apparently necessitated frequent interviews with Captain Paget. Of course such interviews could not take place in the presence of Diana. Gustave was wont, therefore, to wait with praiseworthy patience until the conclusion of the young lady's visit; and would even, with an inconsistent gallantry, urge her to prolong her stay to its utmost limit. "It will always be time for my affairs, Miss Paget," he urged, "and I know how your father values your society; and he well may value it. I only hope my daughters will be as good to me, if I have the gout, by-and-by." Diana had spent nearly a dozen evenings in Omega Street, and on each of those evenings had happened to meet M. Lenoble. She liked him better on every occasion of these accidental meetings. He was indeed a person whom it was difficult for any one to dislike, and in the thirty-four years of his life had never made an enemy. She had been pleased with him on the first evening; his bright handsome face, his courteous reverence for her sex--expressed in every word, every tone, every look--his sympathy with all good thoughts, his freshness and candour, were calculated to charm the coldest and most difficult of judges. Diana liked, and even admired him, but it was from an abstract point of view. He seemed a creature as remote from her own life as a portrait of Henry of Navarre, seen and admired in some royal picture-gallery to-day, to fade out of her memory to-morrow. There was only one point in connection with Gustave Lenoble which occupied her serious thoughts; and this was the nature of his relations with her father. This was a subject that sorely troubled her. Hope as she might for the future, she could not shut her eyes to the past. She knew that her father had lived for years as a cheat and a trickster--now by one species of falsehood and trickery, now by another--rarely incautious, but always unscrupulous. How had this village seigneur of Normandy fallen into the Captain's toils; and what was the nature of the net that was spread for him? The talk of business, the frequent interviews, the evident elation of her father's spirits, combined to assure her that some great scheme was in progress, some commercial enterprise, perhaps not entirely dishonest--nay even honest, when regarded from the sanguine speculator's point of view, but involving the hazard of Gustave Lenoble's fortune.