But she was a good girl in the days that followed and a baffling one to Oliver Seton, who had delightedly foreseen squally weather. He enjoyed quarrelling with a pretty woman. But he soon agreed to agree with a dove-like Laura, and so well that Justin was gratified. For it had seemed to Justin, till she and Oliver between them disturbed him, that Laura was already greatly improved. His idea of a woman, in those dogmatical days, was the ideal of _Mr. Edmund Sparkler_, and Laura, since the evening in Milan that appeared already far away, was daily more completely fulfilling it. If she had been his favourite armchair, at arm’s length from his bookshelves and the back to the light, she could not have suited him better. And, appreciating her, he was pleased that his friend should appreciate her also, and she his friend. He had been worried by their first inimical encounter. Oliver he knew for a weathercock; but Laura’s opinions, negligible as he felt them to be, had always their effect on him: had, until he accounted for them, a singular and uneasy effect upon him, as of undigested apples. That Laura, _with no nonsense about her_, had seen fit to withdraw her objections, was a real if unrealized relief. That Laura, chattering nineteen to Oliver’s dozen, with that ardent and enthusiastic young gentleman securely attached to her painting-apron strings, should like him in her own private heart no whit the better, simply could not occur to him. But then there was so much that did not occur to Justin. There is an incident in the lives of those two friends of his of which he never dreamed; though it took place in the very shadow of his Roman nose; though it rankled a long while, quite three months, in Oliver’s mind and to Laura was a memory that could still make her ears burn when her blushet days had grown as thin and unreal to her as the pressed flowers in her Prayer Book on Sundays.