Kate looked at him, recovering herself, while he stammered through these expressions of solicitude. Now she saw him close at hand, he was a new kind of man. Her scrutiny was not demonstrative, and yet it was exhaustive and penetrating. He was not a foeman worthy of her steel. He was one whom it would be but little credit to subjugate, reckoning by his powers of resistance. He would be an easy, even a willing victim. But it was something else in John which startled the young manslayer. She had seen various specimens of the fashionable young man, such as Providence throws now and then in the way of country girls; and she knew the genus squire, and all that can be produced in the way of professional in such a place as Camelford. It was the county town, and twice a-year there were assizes and barristers within reach; and there were county balls and hunt balls, and various other possibilities which brought the world as represented by the county families and their visitors within reach of the banker’s daughter. Mr Crediton was not a common banker. He was well connected, to begin with, and he was the Rothschild of the neighbourhood. Even to the large red-brick house in the High Street, to which he had been always faithful, very fine people would now and then condescend to come. And Fernwood, his country “place,” was always as full as he liked to make it of autumn guests, so that Kate’s knowledge of men was not inconsiderable. But John Mitford did not belong to any of the types she knew. He was not the ordinary university man, with which she was so well acquainted. He was not the budding curate--mellifluous and deferential. He was not handsome, nor graceful, nor so much as self-possessed. He did not look even as if he were endowed with that ordinary chatter of society which gets people over the difficulty of an eccentric introduction. If she talked the usual nonsense to him, Kate felt doubtful whether he would understand her. “But if one wanted anything done for one!----” she said to herself, with more surprise than ever in her pretty ingenuous-looking eyes. His face was not beautiful, was even a little heavy when in repose, and apt to cloud over with embarrassment, and lose all the light it had when driven into self-consciousness; and yet there was something in it she had never identified, never realised, before. All this passed through her mind while poor John was standing very awkwardly before her, begging her to tell him if he could not get her something, and regretting over and over again that his mother should be out. Goose! Kate thought to herself; and yet felt the influence of that _something_, which was beyond her reckoning, and which she had never made acquaintance with before. “Oh, never mind,” she said; “I am quite comfortable, now I am here. I don’t want anything, thanks. Never mind me. If you are busy, don’t take the trouble to stay. You know I am at home, though I never was here before.”