"Ah! that's all very well; but he shan't see her. Mr. Guyon will back me up in that, I'm sure. I know he will. Good-bye, Charley;" and Mr. Streightley turned the handle of the door and left the chambers. The attorneys whose cases Mr. Yeldham had in hand that day found the celebrated conveyancer a little dilatory. Their clerks attending the next morning were bidden to call again later in the day. You see you don't get through much work when, your feet on the fender, and a pipe in your mouth, you sit for the whole afternoon staring at the grate and chewing the cud of mental reflection. "'He shan't see her!' Why not? Streightley cannot be idiot enough to suppose that there is such fascination in Frere as to--O no! That's not it. 'He shan't see her'--that means they shan't meet, shan't speak, shan't--'Mr. Guyon shall take care of that--he'll back me up'--Mr. Guyon!--they shan't meet! Mr. Guyon back me up!--they shan't meet! No answer to Gordon's proposal, no meeting with him at that ball--old Guyon's reply as to the pre-engagement and--Now, by the Lord, Robert Streightley, I only hope my thoughts are wrong; for if I'm right, you've been led by weakness or worse into a base conspiracy, and henceforth are no friend of mine!" CHAPTER VII. HESTER'S DEBUT. The judgment passed by Robert Streightley on Hester Gould, when he had critically examined her bearing under the novel and trying circumstances of her heiress-ship, was amply borne out by her subsequent conduct. She was a decided success; and though totally unknown to the members of the great world in which she had now taken her place, so that they had no opportunity of comparing her as she was in the present with what she had been in the past, her simplicity of manners, her unassuming tranquillity, as free from deprecation as from assertion, received a tribute of genuine admiration. Miss Gould was as much alive to the little touch of impertinence in this general sentiment as she was to its usefulness and agreeability; but she enjoyed the latter, and did not resent the former. "They are wonderfully kind and polite, and all that," she said one day to Lady Henmarsh, while she was entering a long list of new names and addresses in her visiting-book; "but it amuses me a little to observe that not one of them can quite conceal her surprise at discovering that I look and behave like a lady. How I delight in such _naïveté!_ They let me see, without the least disguise, that they expect me to be vulgar and underbred, but visit me because I am rich and certified by you." "It's the way of the world, my dear Hester," said her friend; "and neither you nor I will change it, be assured." "I don't want to change it, for my part," said Hester; "it suits me very well as it is."