“Now don’t forget, Gabrielle, that Sir Everard Aylmer is the sixteenth baronet, that he has a purse as long as his pedigree, and is an impressionable fool--you’ll never have such a chance again.” “You never take the trouble to quarrel with anyone, and you certainly were never in love?” Sir Everard repeats after her, pretty nearly verbatim, like a parrot. “My dear Miss Beranger, how very dreadful! or rather, how very charming it would be for someone to try to vex you, so that having gone through the first exertion, you may, perchance, fall into the second state.” “Ahem! Hardly probable, I think,” she answers carelessly, averting her head, and peering out into the fragrant shadows. But like Sister Anne, she sees no one, and all she hears is the leaf shaken by the wind; not a sign of the absentees meets her sight, and all her pictured enjoyment at Mrs. Meredyth’s “At Home” turns into the veriest Dead Sea fruit. “Will you give me leave to try, Miss Beranger?” pleads a voice that, though drawling in tone, sounds more genuine than the plupart of voices in Tophet. “To make me quarrel with you? Why, certainly! as the Yankees say; but I warn you that you will not be able to renew the combat a second time.” “Why?” “Oh, because quarrelling is such a nuisance, and it is so seldom worth making it up again, that I always eschew the acquaintance of the belligerent party, you know,” she says flippantly. At this moment she is not only indifferent to, but she detests the very vision of the position and wealth Lady Beranger has put before her in such glowing terms, and which the “impressionable fool” beside her has it in his power to offer. Gabrielle’s heart--if what she has of heart is worthy of the name--is being sorely lacerated by the absence of the only face she loves to look upon, and she recollects fiercely that her sister’s grey eyes can gaze their fill on it, while her own glaring black ones are denied. So she clenches her small fist and in her Bohemian fashion swears inwardly at the cruelty of fate that divides her from Lord Delaval, and barely hears the words of this evidently struck “sixteenth baronet.” “But why should you make that a rule?” he persists. He is not given to talking, but to-night he seems positively garrulous. “Beatrice is a most delicious creature, why should you repudiate being like her, Miss Beranger?” “Because I have no fancy for a Benedick.” “Would you like to be Katherine, then? Is there a Petruchio living at whose bidding you could grow tame?” Is there? she knows there is, and a bright flush suffuses her face while she acknowledges to herself that at his bidding she would be the veriest slave that ever trod the earth, and she answers all the more impetuously, with her eyes flashing. “No! no! no! a hundred times no,” and Sir Everard cannot doubt that she answers truly.