But Tom’s love-reveries did not absorb him to the extent of making him oblivious of the particular object which had brought him to Pincote. It was requisite that he should see Jane alone, and nothing could be done so long as Jane’s companion was in the room with her. Besides which, the squire might come in at any moment, and then his last chance would be gone. Should the worst come to the worst, he was prepared to go up to the front door, knock like any ordinary visitor, and ask to see Miss Culpepper openly and boldly. But it was only as a last resource that he would adopt a measure which, should it come to the squire’s ears, could only lead to inquiry; and inquiry on the squire’s part was what Tom was particularly wishful to avoid. Not that the old man would not have been as stanch as steel in such a case, and would have done anything and everything to assist Lionel. But, unfortunately, he had a garrulous tongue, which could not always be trusted to keep a secret—which often betrayed secrets without knowing that it had done so; and in a matter so grave as the one in which he was now engaged, Tom was careful to avoid the slightest unnecessary risk. It would be far better for every one that the squire should rest in happy ignorance, till the future should bring its own proper time for revealing everything. Whenever any particular question pressed itself strongly on Tom’s mind for solution, he had a habit of looking at it, not from one or two points of view only, but from several; and if nineteen ways out of a difficulty proved, from one cause or another, to be unavailable, he generally found the twentieth to be the very mode of egress for which he had been seeking. So it was in the present case. After considerable cudgelling of his brains, he hit on a simple expedient which seemed to him to be worth trying, but which might or might not prove successful in the result. On the occasion of Tom’s first visit to Pincote, among other pieces played by Jane in the drawing-room after dinner, was a plaintive little waltz, entitled “Venez à Moi,” which took his fancy more than anything he had heard for a long time. Later on in the evening he had asked Jane to play it again, and for days afterwards the air clung to his memory, and seemed in some strange way to mix itself up in his musings whenever he thought of Jane. As if Jane had some faint divination that such was the case, the next time Tom was at Pincote she played the waltz again—this time without being asked; and so also on the third and last time he spent an evening with her. It was on this third occasion, as the final bars of the waltz were dying away in slow-breathed sweetness, that the eyes of Tom and Jane met across the piano—met for a moment only; but that one moment sufficed to reveal a secret which, as yet, they had hardly ventured to whisper to themselves. From that day forth, never so long as they lived, could that simple French melody be forgotten by either of them.