“By George!” cried Molyneux, “it is about to come to a crisis before our eyes. There is your mother calling for Innocent, and I know Longueville’s there----. Now this is what I call exciting. Innocent! Innocent! don’t you hear your aunt calling you? She’s got a new doll for you,” he said, laughing, as the girl came slowly past them. “A good strong india-rubber affair, warranted not to break, that can walk and talk, and say----. She doesn’t take any notice,” he added with some disappointment. “What is she always dreaming about? She has got over all that nonsense about Frederick----” “Please don’t talk so lightly,” said Nelly, still cross in spite of herself. “There never was any nonsense about Frederick. She liked him best, for she knew him first. She has never taken to us very much. I don’t know whether it is our fault or her fault; but there was nothing like what you say.” Molyneux laughed again. “It does not matter,” he said, “though you are very contradictory, Nelly. Of course you are jealous, that’s what it is. Lady Longueville, with a handsome house in town, and half-a-dozen in the country, with diamonds and an opera-box, and everything that’s heavenly. Confess now you do feel it. All this going to your little cousin!” Nelly’s eyes flashed. Few people see the joke of which they are themselves the subject, and Nelly was not superior to the rest of the world; but she had learned the wisdom of restraining her first outburst of feeling. She rose from her seat under the tree, and, going a little apart from him, watched Innocent making her way slowly through the gleams of sunshine and bars of shadow to the drawing-room windows, which were open. When the girl went slowly in through the open window, Nelly breathed forth a little sigh. “Poor child!” she said. She was thinking more of her own strange position than of anything that could come to her cousin. How little she had foreseen the perplexities, the chill doubts, the weakening of faith, the diminution of feeling, the irritation and weariness which often filled her now! Innocent could have no such experience; she was not capable of it; but the one girl threw herself into the position of the other, with a liveliness of feeling which the circumstances scarcely called for. She forgot that Sir Alexis was as unlikely to inspire love as Innocent was to feel it. “I wonder what she will say?” Nelly murmured, with her eyes fixed on the window by which Innocent had disappeared. “Say? nothing! there is one advantage of taciturnity. She will let it all be settled for her. A lucky girl, indeed; your mother must have played her cards very well,” said Molyneux, with real approbation, “after you and I foiled her, Nelly, by our precipitation, to catch the great prize for her niece. You look angry. I think it was extremely clever of her, for my part.”