The girl smilingly rebuts the accusation, appealing quietly to the clock to defend her; but the curtain at the bed-head--it is an old-fashioned tester--which her hand is desperately clutching, could tell a less placid tale. She does not quite hear what next passes, and is aroused only by the sound of Sir George’s voice uttering a strident fiat. “Time’s up!” he cries, with his watch in his hand, in slight to the clock which has proved him wrong; “and we do not allow a minute’s law.” He marshals Mrs. Darcy relentlessly out of the room as he speaks, and the cousins are left _tête-à-tête_. Rupert’s fingers play a meditative tune on the bedclothes; and Lavinia, watching him, and vaguely trying to make out what is the air which they are intending to convey, is surprised by a criminal thought of what a much less virile hand it is than that which she had seen lying in the gauntness of its departed strength on the other man’s coverlet. The air continues, set to a slight sigh. “It is odd to hear him beginning to harp on the old string,” says the man’s weak voice. Lavinia gives a slight shiver. Is the theme to be taken up again, just where the striking of Rivers Sutton Church clock had broken it off five weeks ago? “I do not think you ought to talk of anything agitating yet.” “But it does not agitate me. A knock on the head is not supposed to be a sedative, but in my case it seems to have been one.” The voice and look are as calm as the words, but he has stopped his drumming on the sheet; and she waits in silent apprehension, praying that the subject may drop, since she knows that the time is not yet ripe for her to put her one question. Rupert, however, as is soon clear, has no intention of dropping the subject. “Poor old gentleman! He is not quite up to date, is he?” Lavinia is trembling all over. Has not the moment now come for her to fulfil the vow so solemnly taken, so intertwined with her frantic prayers for his restoration as to be inseparable from them?--the vow to cleave to him through life and death and eternity, without one backward glance, if he be but given back to her extremity of asking? And now that the Invisible Awfulness, whom she had wearied with her insistence, has accomplished His part of the bargain, how dare she tarry with hers? If she does, may not He take back His boon, and leave her to endure an existence made unendurable by a for-ever unanswered question? “If he is not up to date, neither am I,” she replies. Rupert’s eyebrows go up in the old familiar way. “Is that a riddle, dear?” “No,” she answers, purpose and voice strengthening as she proceeds, “it is not a riddle; it is good plain truth. If you mean that your father is not ‘up to date’ because he still believes that we are engaged to be married, _I_ am in the same boat, for _I_ still believe it.”