“And then I should lose my little mosquito,” he says, employing a phrase of no visible aptness to the tall and gracious creature beside him, which she yet welcomes as a proof of peculiar favour. “No doubt my loss would be your gain, as people say when other people’s relatives die”--laughing uncontagiously. “But I do not think I could carry creditably anything more just yet. You see I have lost a good deal one way and another.” There is pathos in his growling voice, and appeal in his shagged eyes, and Lavinia at once feels that she would gladly die for him. “It is settled, then!” she cries with a cheerfulness concerning which she is not quite sure whether she feels it or not. “Rupert marries Lavinia to prevent _her_ marrying any one else, and Lavinia marries Rupert to prevent his marrying any one else, and the bells ring, and we are all happy for ever after!” Her one motive in drawing up this gay programme is to give him pleasure, to chase the hopelessness out of his gaunt face; and perhaps she overdoes the content of her tone, for he stops in his walk to send the gimlet of his suspicious eyes through her. “It is not to please me that you are doing it,” he says with sharp contrariety: “mind that! I would be shot before I would influence you a hair-breadth one way or the other in such a matter. And between you and me”--it is the phrase which usually precedes some unflattering observation upon his son--“if I were a young woman, and Rupert were the last man in the world----” But what Sir George’s course as a young woman would be his niece is determined for once not to hear. “Stop!” she says, laying her firm hand in prohibition upon his arm, and speaking with an authority that for the moment seems to reverse their relative positions. “You must not run down my husband to me!” CHAPTER V The hall-door reveals an unwelcome sight, though no one can deny that it is a showy one, nor that the February sunlight is snobbish enough to treble itself against the brazen glories of the crests on blinker and harness and panel of the Princes’ carriage. It is a fact of disagreeable familiarity to both uncle and niece that Féodorovna Prince will never allow any of her acquaintance to be “not at home;” and that to be pursued to study, toilet-table, and bed is the penalty exacted from those upon whom she chooses to inflict her friendship. The two exchange a look. “Do not let her come near me,” says the man, in accents of peremptory disgust, and so flings off to his den; while Lavinia, with the matter-of-fact unselfishness of the well-broken human female, goes smiling into the drawing-room. After all, it is not Féodorovna, but her mother, who comes forward alone, and with jet-clinking apology. “You do not mind? It is not a thing that one has any right to do? But Féodorovna would insist on getting out, so I got out too.”