Edgar felt so strong an inclination to say nothing about the sudden arrival of his cousins, that he thought it best to communicate at once what had happened. He told his hosts at dinner, describing the brother and sister, and Margaret’s remarkable beauty, which had impressed him greatly. “And really you did not know she was so pretty?” Lady Mary said, fixing a searching look upon him. Instant suspicion flashed up in her mind, a suspicion natural to womankind, that his evident admiration meant at least a possibility of something else. And if she had been consistent, no doubt she would have jumped at this, and felt in it an outlet for all her difficulties, and the safest of all ways of detaching Edgar from any chance of influence over her niece; but she was as inconsistent as most other people, and did not like this easy solution of the difficulty. She offered promptly to call upon the new-comers; but she did not cease to question Edgar about them with curiosity, much sharpened by suspicion. She extracted from him, in full detail, the history of the Murrays, of Margaret’s early widowhood, and the special union which existed between her and her brother. Harry Thornleigh had arrived at Tottenham’s that day, and the story interested him still more than it did Lady Mary. Poor Harry was glad enough to get away from his father’s sole companionship; but he did not anticipate very much enjoyment of the kindred seclusion here. He grasped at Edgar as a drowning man grasps at a rope. “I say, let’s go somewhere and smoke. I have so many things to tell you, and so many things to ask you,” he cried, when Lady Mary had gone to bed, and Mr. Tottenham, too, had departed to his private retirement, and Edgar, not knowing, any more than Harry himself did, that young Thornleigh was set over him as a sentinel, to guard him from all possibility of mischief, was but too glad to find himself with an uninstructed bystander, from whom he could have those bare “news” without consciousness or under-current of meaning, which convey so much more information than the scrap of enlightenment which well-meaning friends dole out with more and more sparing hands, in proportion as the feelings of the hearer are supposed to be more or less concerned. Harry was not so ignorant as Edgar thought him. He was not bright, but he flattered himself on being a man of the world, and was far from being uninterested in Gussy’s persistent neglect of all possible “opportunities.” “A girl don’t stand out like that without some cause for it,” Harry would have said, sagaciously; but he was too knowing to let it be perceived that he knew.