"I am afraid I shall have to give way at last," he said to himself as he rode slowly along the Kilburn Road; "but it will defeat all my schemes for my daughter's future. What a splendid match such a girl as she is might have made but for this unfortunate acquaintance with the son of a schoolmaster! However, the Herberts are coming by-and-by. I must get Helen to talk to Mary. Mrs. Herbert's mother was proud and ambitious enough about her daughters, and had I not had money"--and he paused as a memory arose, and then added, "and the love and gratitude of Maria St. Clair, I should have had but a poor chance." Such reflections as these always aroused conscience in Mr. Armstrong's heart. He loosened Firefly's bridle, and the spirited though well-trained animal started off at a trot towards town, scattering his rider's painful thoughts with every movement. But Mr. Armstrong's hopes of gaining allies in his wife's relations were very quickly crushed. When he returned home he found the colonel and his wife seated in the drawing-room with Mrs. Armstrong, and Mary walking round the garden with her cousin. "Come and show me the garden, Mary," had been the request of the captain after she had laughingly joked him on his large black whiskers and generally fierce appearance, and she had readily complied with his wish. "So you are not married yet, Mary," were his first words, as they stood for a moment on the steps leading into the garden to admire the prospect; "why, I heard such accounts from my mother of your conquests and splendid offers, that I almost expected to find my pretty cousin a duchess or at least a countess." "Oh, don't joke about these things, cousin Charles," she replied, with a flush on her face and a quivering lip, "you cannot think what pain it gave me to refuse these gentlemen who so kindly preferred me to others, but I could not have married any of them." Charles Herbert observed the flush and the trembling lip, and for a short distance they walked on in silence. "There is something hidden under all this," he said to himself; "my mother wont tell me anything, but I mean to find out." They continued their walk, now and then pausing to notice the beautiful flowers that bordered their path. Mary, who had quickly recovered herself, soon convinced her cousin that she knew more of botany than he did. They turned into a pleasant walk bordered with shrubs and overshadowed with trees, and reached the shrubbery. "Mary," said her cousin suddenly, "tell me the truth; I have a reason for asking; is Henry Halford at the bottom of all this indifference to wealth and position and that sort of thing?" Mary's eyes filled with tears; the presence of her cousin Charles had recalled to her memory the happy week at Oxford, and the reminiscences thus aroused were more than she could bear unmoved. She turned very pale, but she had no wish to disguise the truth from her cousin, the playmate of her childhood; and she said--