When he first saw Lucy at her dinner-party, he said to himself, "That's a sweet woman. I shall fall in love with her." To say as much was proof that he had already done so; but it was the sudden conviction of it which inspired him, filled him with effervescent nonsense and made him the best of company, for a dinner-party. Throughout it, at his wildest and most irresponsible, his fancy and imagination were at work upon her. He read her to the soul, or thought so. Chance, and Lancelot, gave him the chart of the terrain. The switch at the drawing-room door gave him his plan. The opportunity came, and he dared to take it. He marked the effect upon her. It was exactly what he had foreseen. He saw her eyes humid upon Macartney, her hand at rest on his arm. Jesuitry palliated what threatened to seem monstrous, even to him. "God bless her, I drive her to her man. What's the harm in that?" So he went on--once more, and yet again; and in the meantime by daylight and by more honest ways he gained her confidence and her liking. He saw no end to the affair so prosperously begun, and didn't trouble about one. All he cared about just now were two courtships--the vicarious in the dark, and the avowed of the daylight. He intended to go on. He was full of it--in the midst of his other passions of the hour, such as this of the air. He was certain of his direction, as certain as he had ever been. But now his mistakes and miscalculations began. He had mistaken his Lucy, and his Macartney too. What he didn't know about Macartney, Lucy did know; what he didn't know about Lucy was that she had found out James. James as Eros wouldn't do, chiefly because such conduct on James's part would have been incredible. Urquhart didn't know it would be incredible, nor did he know that she did. One other thing he didn't know, which was that Lucy was half his own before she started for Martley. She, in fact, didn't know it either. She had been his from the moment when she had asked him to keep out of the air, and he had declined. All this is necessary matter, because in the light of it his next deliberated move in his game was a bad mistake. On the night before she was expected at Martley, being there himself, he wrote her a letter to this effect: "Dear Mrs. Macartney: To my dismay and concern I find that I can't be here to receive you, nor indeed until you are on the point to go away. I shall try hard for Sunday, which will give me one day with you--better to me than a thousand elsewhere. Vera will be my curate. Nothing will be omitted which will show you how much Martley owes you, or how much I am, present or absent, yours, "J. U." That letter he gave to Vera Nugent to deliver to Lucy. Vera wanted to know what it was all about. "It's to say that I can't be here," he said. "That is the fact, unfortunately."