"How dare----" began Sir Dace; but Coralie interrupted him. "Papa, I will go and see. I am sure Verena cannot be out; I am sure she is _not_. She went into her room to dress when I went into mine. She came to me while she was dressing asking me to lend her my pearl comb; she had just broken one of the teeth of her own. She meant to come down to dinner then and was dressing for it: she had no thought of going out." Coralie halted at the door to say all this, and then ran up the stairs. She came down crest-fallen. Verena had stolen a march on them. In Sir Dace Fontaine's passionate anger, he explained the whole to us, taking but a few short sentences to do it. Verena had been beguiled into a marriage engagement with Edward Pym: he, Sir Dace, had forbidden her to go out of the house to meet him; and, as it appeared, she had set his authority at defiance. They were no doubt tramping off now to some place of amusement; a theatre, perhaps: the past evening they had gone to Madame Tussaud's. "Will you take in Miss Fontaine, Squire?" concluded Sir Dace, with never a break between that and the explanation. How dark and sullen he looked, I can recall even now. Deprived of my promised partner, Verena, I went down alone. Sir Dace following with Jack, into whose arm he put his own. "I wish you joy of your chief officer, Captain Tanerton!" cried he, a sardonic smile on his lips. It must have been, I suppose, about nine o'clock. We were all back in the drawing-room, and Coralie had been singing. But somehow the song fell flat; the contretemps about Verena, or perhaps the sullenness it had left on Sir Dace, produced a sense of general discomfort; and nobody asked for another. Coralie took her dainty work-box off a side-table, and sat down by me on the sofa. "I may as well take up my netting, as not," she said to me in an undertone. "Verena began a new collar to-day--which she will be six months finishing, if she ever finishes it at all. She dislikes the work; I love it." Netting was the work most in vogue at that time. Mrs. Todhetley had just netted herself a cap. "Do you think we shall see your sister to-night?" I asked of Coralie in a whisper. "Of course you will, if you don't run away too soon. She'll not come in later than ten o'clock." "Don't you fancy that it has put out Sir Dace very much?" Coralie nodded. "It is something new for papa to attempt to control us; and he does not like to find he _can't_. In this affair I take his part; not Verena's. Edward Pym is not a suitable match for her in any way. For myself, I dislike him." "I don't much like him, either; and I am sure Captain Tanerton does not. Your sister is in love with him, and can see no fault. Cupid's eyes are blind, you know." "I don't know it at all," she laughed. "My turn with Cupid has not yet come, Johnny Ludlow. I do not much think Cupid could blind me, though he may be blind himself. If--why, what's this?"