“Is this what has happened to you?” he said. “This is what has happened to me,” said Harry. “I’m very sorry--nobody can be more sorry--it shuts me out from a great deal I had got to be proud of, and happy in. I wish I had made any blunder in the world rather than this; but it’s done, and I can’t help it. So the only thing I have got to do now is---- well, either to stay away from the house, or to go away altogether, as you think best.” “I suppose then that at my house you run the risk,” said the Vice-Consul, with suspicious breaks in his words, either of doubt or excitement, “of meeting--the young lady?” Harry did not say a word; but he looked at him fixedly, with a deep colour flaming over his face. At this the Vice-Consul gazed at him with an alarmed expression, gradually catching fire too. “You don’t mean to say----?” he cried, and then he was silent, and there ensued a confused and uncomfortable pause. “Yes, Sir,” said Harry. He had looked his chief in the face all this time; but now he avoided the other’s eye, “that is just how it stands. I told you it was not my fault. I never thought of such a thing. It never,” he said, putting out his hand to a bundle of papers upon the table by which he was standing, and turning them vaguely over and over, “it never--happened to me before.” When the Vice-Consul looked at him standing there, with that look of half-astonished simplicity on his face, and those artless words on his lips, it was all he could do to keep in an outburst of laughter. He thought he had never come in contact with so simple-minded, and candid, and honourable a fellow. He was startled and alarmed, and made uneasy by his confession; but yet he had the greatest desire to laugh. Yet why should he laugh? it was serious enough; his lively mind jumped to the possibility that his Rita might prefer this young stranger to himself. It would be an extraordinary choice, he could not but think; but yet, alas! that was how things often were in this strange world. A girl would prefer a man she had seen three or four times in a ball-room, to the father whose very existence she was; and nobody would be surprised at it; it was the course of nature; it was the way of the world. This idea chilled and alarmed him to the bottom of his heart; but yet he could hardly help laughing at Harry and his perturbed air. “I never thought of such a thing--it never happened before.” The Consul was almost too much amused to take in the seriousness of the event. “I presume you have said nothing to her,” he said at last, looking portentously serious by reason of the inclination to untimely mirth, which he had to subdue. “That is just the thing,” cried Harry, rousing up from his bashful pre-occupation. “No, I have not spoken--what you would call speaking; but on Monday night I just dropped a word----” “Good Lord!” cried the Vice-Consul. He had no longer any inclination to laugh; what he was disposed to do was to take the young fellow by the throat.