The next afternoon John and Kate were on the lawn, with Mrs Mitford sitting by, when Fred Huntley suddenly rode in at the gate. The two young people had no particular inclination for croquet, but the lawn had been mowed, and Mrs Mitford had given up her schools for one day, and seated herself outside the drawing-room window to countenance their intercourse. She did not take any part in their talk, but knitted with as much placidity as she could command, having reasoned with herself all the night through, and finally made up her mind that it would be better for her to take no part, but let things take their course. “If I try to influence her, she will think I have interested motives; and if I try to influence him, my boy will turn against me,” she had said to herself piteously, shedding a few silent tears under cover of the night; and her decision had been, that she would only stand by and look on, that was all. For the first time in his life John’s mother felt herself incapable of helping, or guiding, or being of any service to her boy. She had to see him face the danger, and say nothing--the danger on one hand of being secularised, and his heart turned to frivolity; and on the other, of having that heart broken. Which was the worse his mother could scarcely tell. So these two were trifling, each with a mallet, and talking, and getting more and more interested in each other, when Fred Huntley, as I have said, rode suddenly in upon them. He gave a very keen knowing glance at the two on the lawn, as he passed them to pay his respects to Mrs Mitford. Was it her doing? was it their own doing? Fred caught the secret of the situation as a well-trained man of the world would naturally do. He had first a natural impulse to interfere; and then he paused and stopped himself, and declared to himself that he would not spoil sport. He was a man to whom generous thoughts came not, as is natural, by impulse, but upon thought. And after all, why should he meddle with them? If she married John, it would be a good thing for John, and, most likely, for her too--and why should I interfere? said Fred, without a doubt of his capability to do so; so he went and talked to Mrs Mitford, while the two on the lawn pursued their languid sport. “I hate him,” Kate had said on his arrival; “let us pretend we have begun a game;” and John was but too happy--too much delighted, by the suggestion. So they kept the lawn to themselves, and trifled and talked, while Fred chatted with the chaperone over her knitting. He had come to make the apologies of his family, expecting to find an assemblage of ladies with John in the midst, the one island of black among clouds of muslin. The ladies in Fanshawe Regis were not even young, and consequently it was a relief to him to see one pretty figure only, and the mother sitting by; and he did his best to make himself agreeable, having, as it happened, a more interesting subject than “le beau temps et la pluie.”